Practical homomorphic encryption: A survey

Abstract

Cloud computing technology has rapidly evolved over the last decade, offering an alternative way to store and work with large amounts of data. However data security remains an important issue particularly when using a public cloud service provider. The recent area of homomorphic cryptography allows computation on encrypted data, which would allow users to ensure data privacy on the cloud and increase the potential market for cloud computing. A significant amount of research on homomorphic cryptography appeared in the literature over the last few years; yet the performance of existing implementations of encryption schemes remains unsuitable for real time applications. One way this limitation is being addressed is through the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for implementations of homomorphic encryption schemes. This review presents the current state of the art in this promising new area of research and highlights the interesting remaining open problems.

Hardware Support for Security in the Internet of Things: From Lightweight Countermeasures to Accelerated Homomorphic Encryption

“…To avoid this, homomorphic encryption can be used. In that case, computations can be made directly on encrypted data, using various schemes [4]. However, such encryption schemes are extremely costly, both in terms of performance and the size of the data.…”

“…However, preserving data confidentiality is of upmost importance in many domains such as genomic analysis, healthcare or other applications using very private data. In this context, homomorphic encryption [4] has become a very appealing solution, but with a cost remaining today that is too high to satisfy the practical requirements in most cases. There is therefore a need to make these approaches more practical, without resorting to very large computing systems.…”

Challenges of Fully Homomorphic Encryptions for the Internet of Things

“…In spite of having many desirable potentials and many theoretical and software oriented efforts in improving the performances, currently available SHE and FHE schemes are still not efficient enough for IoT and other real-time applications [33]. Recently, the development of optimized FHE architectures by using GPU technology or FPGA technology are being explored [33].…”

“…Recently, the development of optimized FHE architectures by using GPU technology or FPGA technology are being explored [33]. We deter more detailed discussions on this issue in the next section.…”

“…At present, concerning over loss of privacy is an overwhelming barrier towards the adoption of IoT and cloud services [30]. An ideal solution of towards this problem is to store all data in the encrypted form and perform computations on encrypted data, without fully decrypting the data on the cloud [33]. To this end, we need an encryption scheme that allows meaningful computation on encrypted data, namely a homomorphic encryption (HE) scheme.…”