Paper 2025/581

Reusable Dynamic Multi-Party Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a promising primitive for evaluating arbitrary circuits while keeping the user's privacy. We investigate how to use HE in the multi-party setting where data is encrypted with several distinct keys. One may use the Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption (MKHE) in this setting, but it has space/computation overhead of $$ for the number of users $$, which makes it impractical when $$ grows large. On the contrary, Multi-Party Homomorphic Encryption (MPHE) is the other Homomorphic Encryption primitive in the multi-party setting, where the space/computation overhead is $$; however, is limited in terms of ciphertext reusability and dynamicity, that ciphertexts are encrypted just for a group of parties and cannot be reused for other purposes, and that additional parties cannot join the computation dynamically. Contrary to MKHE, where the secret key owners engage only in the decryption phase, we consider a more relaxed situation where the secret key owners can communicate before the computation. In that case, we can reduce the size of a ciphertext and the evaluation complexity from $$ to $$ as in a single-key HE setting. We call this primitive as {\em Reusable Dynamic Multi-Party Homomorphic Encryption}, which is more suitable in real-world scenarios. We show that 1) the procedures before the computation can be done in a very few rounds of communications, 2) the evaluation/space complexities are independent of the number of users, and 3) the functionalities are as efficient as MKHE, with asymptotic analysis and with implementation.