When a cloud service provider supporting encrypted storage of documents want to enable the user to edit their documents without decrypting them first, such issues can be rescued by using Homomorphic encryption. Homomorphic encryption gives the ability to outsource the storage and computation of data to the cloud environment by converting data into encrypted form first.
Homomorphic encryption allows computation to be performed directly on encrypted data without requiring access to the secret key. The result of the process will be in an encrypted format and can be accessed by the owner revealing the secret key at the later point.
According to the homomorphic encryption standardization in which the industry standards consortium follows the official standards, guidance, and information on the development area which allows the use of the same computational analysis solution.
For homomorphic encryption to cipher suites are designed. The designing of cipher suites means to be malleable which means they cannot guarantee the integrity of data; this is an intended feature that makes it easy to operate on the data that is encrypted.
Types of homomorphic encryption
All data are numbers hence encryption and decryption are the complex play of operations on numbers.
- Partially homomorphic encryption (PHE): which allows one type of operation on the given data set for unlimited times such as multiplication.
- Somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE): This allows both addition and multiplication on given data sets only for times.
- Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE): allows different types of operations on the dataset for unlimited times but with significant trade-off performance.
Homomorphic encryption use cases
Regulated and privacy-centric use cases:
Here storing data and personally identifiable information in highly regulated industries. Encrypted storing data is used as a security measure but challenges arise when they decrypt the user data to get insight into it. For example on predictive analytics, the use of machine learning helps the doctor to cure the disease of the patient files. Homomorphic encryption, the analytical algorithm used to encrypt patient data and produce results also in encrypt form which when decrypted would provide the same insight that would have come from unencrypted patient files.
Outsourced cloud storage:
Outsourcing data storage is a cost-effective strategy when it comes to reducing the personal costs, encryption solving the problem of data storage but adding or modify the encrypted data in its encrypted form can be solved by homomorphic encryption, by using this data stored in the cloud while allowing to calculate and search the encrypted information and only the user who owns the data in the cloud can decrypt.
The homomorphic encryption standardization website gives many open-source implementations of homomorphic encryption. Microsoft SEAL avail encryption libraries that allow computations to be performed on the encrypted data for helping developers in making end-to-end encrypted data storage and computation services.
