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Towards Real-World Private Computations with Homomorphic Encryption: Current Solutions and Open Challenges

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Computer Security. ESORICS 2023 International Workshops (ESORICS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14398))

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Abstract

There is an increasing need to share sensitive information within and beyond organisations. Protecting this information is vital for commercial and regulatory reasons. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) has come to the fore as a mechanism to enable the sharing of confidential data in a secure and private manner. Multiple open-source libraries are now publicly available, providing organisations with the tools to utilise the advantages of HE. While research devoted much effort to the academic and cryptographic aspects of HE schemes, research explicitly focusing on real-world financial applications is comparably rare. There is a need to provide a comparative analysis and related benchmarking of the most suitable HE libraries, having fixed the functional and non-functional requirements of the enterprise application of interest. We consider the motivation and background for HE and discuss the most promising open-source HE libraries. Having introduced real-world use cases in a financial context, we then illustrate outstanding challenges and how we plan to circumvent open points, introducing HELT (Homomorphic Encryption Libraries Toolkit).

The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Banca d’Italia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Banca d’Italia, Rome, Italy

    Michela Iezzi & Andrea Leonetti

  2. The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK

    Carsten Maple

Authors
  1. Michela Iezzi
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  2. Carsten Maple
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  3. Andrea Leonetti
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michela Iezzi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Gjøvik, Norway

    Sokratis Katsikas

  2. Polytechnique Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Frédéric Cuppens

  3. Polytechnique Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Nora Cuppens-Boulahia

  4. University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece

    Costas Lambrinoudakis

  5. Télécom SudParis, Palaiseau, France

    Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro

  6. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

    Guillermo Navarro-Arribas

  7. University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    Pantaleone Nespoli

  8. University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece

    Christos Kalloniatis

  9. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    John Mylopoulos

  10. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Annie Antón

  11. University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece

    Stefanos Gritzalis

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Iezzi, M., Maple, C., Leonetti, A. (2024). Towards Real-World Private Computations with Homomorphic Encryption: Current Solutions and Open Challenges. In: Katsikas, S., et al. Computer Security. ESORICS 2023 International Workshops. ESORICS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14398. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54204-6_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54204-6_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-54203-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-54204-6

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