Paper 2022/381

On Extension of Evaluation Algorithms in Keyed-Homomorphic Encryption

Hirotomo Shinoki and Koji Nuida

Abstract

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is public key encryption that enables computation over ciphertexts without decrypting them, while it is known that HE cannot achieve IND-CCA2 security. To overcome this issue, the notion of keyed-homomorphic encryption (KH-PKE) was introduced, which has a separate homomorphic evaluation key and can achieve stronger security (Emura et al., PKC 2013). The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, the syntax of KH-PKE supposes that homomorphic evaluation is performed for single operations, and its security notion called KH-CCA security was formulated based on this syntax. Consequently, if the homomorphic evaluation algorithm is enhanced in a way of gathering up sequential operations as a single evaluation, then it is not obvious whether or not KH-CCA security is preserved. In this paper, we show that KH-CCA security is in general not preserved under such modification, while KH-CCA security is preserved when the original scheme additionally satisfies circuit privacy. Secondly, Catalano and Fiore (ACM CCS 2015) proposed a conversion method from linearly HE schemes into two-level HE schemes, the latter admitting addition and a single multiplication for ciphertexts. In this paper, we extend the conversion to the case of linearly KH-PKE schemes to obtain two-level KH-PKE schemes. Moreover, based on the generalized version of Catalano-Fiore conversion, we also construct a similar conversion from d-level KH-PKE schemes into 2d-level KH-PKE schemes.