A Guide to Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Frederik Armknecht; Colin Boyd; Christopher Carr; Kristian Gjøsteen; Angela Jäschke; Christian A.  Reuter; Martin Strand

Paper 2015/1192

A Guide to Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Frederik Armknecht, Colin Boyd, Christopher Carr, Kristian Gjøsteen, Angela Jäschke, Christian A. Reuter, and Martin Strand

Abstract

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) has been dubbed the holy grail of cryptography, an elusive goal which could solve the IT world's problems of security and trust. Research in the area exploded after 2009 when Craig Gentry showed that FHE can be realised in principle. Since that time considerable progress has been made in finding more practical and more efficient solutions. Whilst research quickly developed, terminology and concepts became diverse and confusing so that today it can be difficult to understand what the achievements of different works actually are. The purpose of this paper is to address three fundamental questions: What is FHE? What can FHE be used for? What is the state of FHE today? As well as surveying the field, we clarify different terminology in use and prove connections between different FHE notions.

Note: Updated the acknowledgements.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Contact author(s): reuter @ uni-mannheim de
History: 2016-09-14: last of 3 revisions; 2015-12-16: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2015/1192
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/1192,
      author = {Frederik Armknecht and Colin Boyd and Christopher Carr and Kristian Gjøsteen and Angela Jäschke and Christian A.  Reuter and Martin Strand},
      title = {A Guide to Fully Homomorphic Encryption},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/1192},
      year = {2015},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1192}
}