Building applications with homomorphic encryption

In 2009, Craig Gentry introduced the first “fully" homomorphic encryption scheme allowing arbitrary circuits to be evaluated on encrypted data [17]. Homomorphic encryption is a very powerful cryptographic primitive, though it has often been viewed by practitioners as too inefficient for practical applications. However, the performance of these encryption schemes has come a long way from that of Gentry’s original work: there are now several well-maintained libraries implementing homomorphic encryption schemes and protocols demonstrating impressive performance results, alongside an ongoing standardization effort by the community. In this tutorial we survey the existing homomorphic encryption landscape, providing both a general overview of the state of the art, as well as a deeper dive into several of the existing libraries. We aim to provide a thorough introduction to homomorphic encryption accessible by the broader computer security community. Several of the presenters are core developers of well-known publicly available homomorphic encryption libraries, and organizers of the homomorphic encryption standardization effort HomomorphicEncryption.org [2]. This tutorial is targeted at application developers, security researchers, privacy engineers, graduate students, and anyone else interested in learning the basics of modern homomorphic encryption. The tutorial is divided into two parts: Part I is accessible by everyone comfortable with basic college-level math; Part II will cover more advanced topics, including descriptions of some of the different homomorphic encryption schemes and libraries, concrete example applications and code samples, and a deeper discussion on implementation challenges. Part II requires the audience to be familiar with modern C++.