Fully homomorphic encryption: A case study

Abstract

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is the holy grail of encrypted communications. It opens the door to several advanced functionalities to overcome the security and trust issues of the IT world. After 2009, once Craig Gentry had shown that FHE could be achieved, a study in this field boomed, and significant improvement was made in identifying more efficient and realistic programs. FHE is primitive cryptography that enables arbitrary functions to be calculated via encrypted data. These systems are applicable in different ways since they permit users to encrypt their private information securely while still outsourcing the processing of protected data without fearing disclosing the real data. In 2012, LTV12 presented the first multi-key FHE system and demonstrated the possibility of using multi-key systems in somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE). Like in the one key context, there have been many advances in the field, but no effort has been made to develop the multi-key methods. This paper presents a discussion of FHE and MKFHE with a specific focus on the current techniques and three implementations, comprising the first in the multi-key setups, to the extent of our understanding.