A fully homomorphic encryption scheme with symmetric keys with application to private data processing in clouds

Abstract

With single computer's computation power not sufficing, need for sharing resources to manipulate and manage data through clouds is increasing rapidly. Hence, it is favorable to delegate computations or store data with a third party, the cloud provider. However, delegating data to third party poses the risks of data disclosure during computation. The problem can be addressed by carrying out computation without decrypting the encrypted data. The results are also obtained encrypted and can be decrypted at the user side. This requires modifying functions in such a way that they are still executable while privacy is ensured or to search an encrypted database. Homomorphic encryption provides security to cloud consumer data while preserving system usability. We propose a symmetric key homomorphic encryption scheme based on matrix operations with primitives that make it easily adaptable for different needs in various cloud computing scenarios.