Practical Applications of Homomorphic Encryption

Michael Brenner, Henning Perl, Matthew Smith

2012

Abstract

Homomorphic cryptography has been one of the most interesting topics of mathematics and computer security since Gentry presented the first construction of a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme in 2009. Since then, a number of different schemes have been found, that follow the approach of bootstrapping a fully homomorphic scheme from a somewhat homomorphic foundation. All existing implementations of these systems clearly proved, that fully homomorphic encryption is not yet practical, due to significant performance limitations. However, there are many applications in the area of secure methods for cloud computing, distributed computing and delegation of computation in general, that can be implemented with homomorphic encryption schemes of limited depth. We discuss a simple algebraically homomorphic scheme over the integers that is based on the factorization of an approximate semiprime integer. We analyze the properties of the scheme and provide a couple of known protocols that can be implemented with it. We also provide a detailed discussion on searching with encrypted search terms and present implementations and performance figures for the solutions discussed in this paper.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Brenner M., Perl H. and Smith M. (2012). Practical Applications of Homomorphic Encryption . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2012) ISBN 978-989-8565-24-2, pages 5-14. DOI: 10.5220/0003969400050014

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt12,
author={Michael Brenner and Henning Perl and Matthew Smith},
title={Practical Applications of Homomorphic Encryption},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2012)},
year={2012},
pages={5-14},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003969400050014},
isbn={978-989-8565-24-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2012)
TI - Practical Applications of Homomorphic Encryption
SN - 978-989-8565-24-2
AU - Brenner M.
AU - Perl H.
AU - Smith M.
PY - 2012
SP - 5
EP - 14
DO - 10.5220/0003969400050014