On the use of homomorphic encryption to secure cloud computing, services, and routing protocols

TL;DR

This paper explores using homomorphic encryption to secure cloud computing, services, and routing protocols by enabling data processing without decryption, thus enhancing privacy and security in outsourced computations.

Contribution

It introduces new homomorphic encryption-based circuits for secure data processing and management in cloud environments, with practical prototypes demonstrating performance and robustness.

Findings

Secure data processing with homomorphic encryption is feasible in cloud services.

Prototypes show acceptable performance and robustness.

Models can be adapted to various application areas.

Abstract

The trend towards delegating data processing to a remote party raises major concerns related to privacy violations for both end-users and service providers. These concerns have attracted the attention of the research community, and several techniques have been proposed to protect against malicious parties by providing secure communication protocols. Most of the proposed techniques, however, require the involvement of a third party, and this by itself can be viewed as another security concern. These security breaches can be avoided by following a new approach that depends on data sorted, managed, and stored in encrypted form at the remote servers. To realize such an approach, the encryption cryptosystem must support algebraic operations over encrypted data. This cryptosystem can be effective in protecting data and supporting the construction of programs that can process encrypted input and produce encrypted output. In fact, the latter programs do not decrypt the input, and therefore, they can be run by an un-trusted party without revealing their data and internal states. Furthermore, such programs prove to be practical in situations where we need to outsource private computations, especially in the context of cloud computing. Homomorphic cryptosystems are perfectly aligned with these objectives as they are a strong foundation for schemes that allow a blind processing of encrypted data without the need to decrypt them. In this dissertation we rely on homomorphic encryption schemes to secure cloud computing, services and routing protocols. We design several circuits that allow for the blind processing and management of data such that malicious parties are denied access to sensitive information. We select five areas to apply our models to. These models are easily customized for many other areas. We also provide prototypes that we use to study the performance and robustness of our models.