k-Anonymously Private Search over Encrypted Data

TL;DR

This paper evaluates different homomorphic encryption methods for private search schemes that ensure k-anonymity, highlighting Goldwasser-Micali's practicality over slower fully homomorphic encryptions.

Contribution

It provides a comparative benchmarking of homomorphic encryption schemes for private search with k-anonymity, using open-source cryptographic libraries.

Findings

Goldwasser-Micali encryption is practically efficient.

Fully homomorphic encryptions are significantly slower.

Partial homomorphic schemes outperform fully homomorphic ones in this context.

Abstract

In this paper we compare the performance of various homomorphic encryption methods on a private search scheme that can achieve $k$-anonymity privacy. To make our benchmarking fair, we use open sourced cryptographic libraries which are written by experts and well scrutinized. We find that Goldwasser-Micali encryption achieves good enough performance for practical use, whereas fully homomorphic encryptions are much slower than partial ones like Goldwasser-Micali and Paillier.