Can Homomorphic Encryption be Practical?

Abstract. 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. 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 efficiency – can homomorphic encryption ever be efficient 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 affairs, our contribution is two-fold. First, ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: IACR
• Authors: Kristin Lauter, Michael Naehrig, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
• Keywords: Concept Implementation, Encryption Schemes, IACR 2011, Proof Of Concept