Symmetrical Disguise: Realizing Homomorphic Encryption Services from Symmetric Primitives

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a modern cryptographic technique that allows direct computations on encrypted data. While relatively new to the mainstream debate, HE has been a solid topic in research for decades. However, and despite the technological advances of the past years, HE’s inefficiencies render it impractical for deployment in realistic scenarios. Hence research in the field is still in its initial phase. To overcome certain challenges and bring HE closer to a realization phase, researchers recently introduced the promising concept of Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption (HHE) – a primitive that combines symmetric cryptography with HE. Using HHE, users perform local data encryptions using a symmetric encryption scheme and then outsource them to the cloud. Upon reception, the cloud can transform the symmetrically encrypted data to homomorphic ciphertexts without decrypting them. Such an approach can be seen as an opportunity to build new, privacy-respecting cloud services, as the most expensive operations of HE can be moved to the cloud.

In this work, we undertake the task of designing a secure cryptographic protocol based on HHE. In particular, we show how HHE can be used as the main building block of a protocol that allows an analyst to collect data from multiple sources and compute specific functions over them, in a privacy-preserving way. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that aims at demonstrating how HHE can be utilized in realistic scenarios, through the design of a secure protocol.