A Homomorphic Encryption Service to Secure Data Processing in a Cloud/Edge Continuum Context

Abstract

For years, one of the major issues against the adoption of Cloud computing has been security. Typically, with traditional symmetric and asymmetric encryption schemes, data can be encrypted and sent into Cloud data centers, but this approach presents a great weakness: data must be transferred to the client-side to be deciphered and then processed. Nevertheless, such an approach is not feasible for a large amount of data. In this paper, we address such an issue through the adoption of homomorphic encryption in a Cloud/Edge continuum environment. Specifically, pieces of data are encrypted in the Edge and transferred into the Cloud for storage and processing without the need to decode them. Experiments performed on different homomorphic encryption schemes in a Cloud/Edge testbed highlight the goodness of our approach.