Paper 2019/1446

Boolean functions for homomorphic-friendly stream ciphers

Claude Carlet and Pierrick Méaux

Abstract

The proliferation of small embedded devices having growing but still limited computing and data storage facilities, and the related development of cloud services with extensive storage and computing means, raise nowadays new privacy issues because of the outsourcing of data processing. This has led to a need for symmetric cryptosystems suited for hybrid symmetric-FHE encryption protocols, ensuring the practicability of the FHE solution. Recent ciphers meant for such use have been introduced, such as LowMC, Kreyvium, FLIP, and Rasta. The introduction of stream ciphers devoted to symmetric-FHE frameworks such as FLIP and its recent modification has in its turn posed new problems on the Boolean functions to be used in them as filter functions. We recall the state of the art in this matter and present further studies (without proof).