The prospect of outsourcing an increasing amount of data storage and management to cloud services raises many new privacy concerns for individuals and businesses alike. The privacy concerns can be satisfactorily addressed if users encrypt the data they send to the cloud. If the encryption scheme is homomorphic, the cloud can still perform meaningful computations on the data, even though it is encrypted.<\/p>\n
In fact, we now know a number of constructions of fully homomorphic encryption schemes that allow arbitrary computation on encrypted data. In the last two years, solutions for fully homomorphic encryption have been proposed and improved upon, but it is hard to ignore the elephant in the room, namely e\ufb03ciency \u2013 can homomorphic encryption ever be e\ufb03cient enough to be practical? Certainly, it seems that all known fully homomorphic encryption schemes have a long way to go before they can be used in practice. Given this state of a\ufb00airs, our contribution is two-fold.<\/p>\n
First, we exhibit a number of real-world applications, in the medical, \ufb01nancial, and the advertising domains, which require only that the encryption scheme is \u201csomewhat\u201d homomorphic. Somewhat homomorphic encryption schemes, which support a limited number of homomorphic operations, can be much faster, and more compact than fully homomorphic encryption schemes.<\/p>\n
Secondly, we show a proof-of-concept implementation of the recent somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme of Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan, whose security relies on the \u201cring learning with errors\u201d (Ring LWE) problem. The system is very e\ufb03cient, and has reasonably short ciphertexts. Our unoptimized implementation in magma enjoys comparable e\ufb03ciency to even optimized pairing-based schemes with the same level of security and homomorphic capacity. We also show a number of application-speci\ufb01c optimizations to the encryption scheme, most notably the ability to convert between di\ufb00erent message encodings in a ciphertext.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The prospect of outsourcing an increasing amount of data storage and management to cloud services raises many new privacy concerns for individuals and businesses alike. The privacy concerns can be satisfactorily addressed if users encrypt the data they send to the cloud. If the encryption scheme is homomorphic, the cloud can still perform meaningful computations 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