Industrial and Applied Math

Date: April 24, 2017

Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM

Location: BLOC 220

Speaker: Kim Laine, Microsoft

Title: Overview of Homomorphic Encryption and Applications

Abstract: The rise of homomorphic encryption is undoubtedly one of the most exciting developments in the history of modern cryptography. Essentially, it allows computations to be applied to encrypted data, without the evaluating party learning any information about either the input or the output of the computation. In this talk I will give a high-level overview of homomorphic encryption, and show some of the core definitions and constructions using ideal lattices from power-of-2 cyclotomic number fields. In particular, I will show how the homomorphic property is achieved in the Fan-Vercauteren scheme, which is implemented by several open-source libraries. While theoretically powerful, all known constructions of homomorphic encryption introduce a significant performance overhead. I will discuss our attempts at overcoming this overhead in the cases of specific example applications. Time permitting, I will mention some exciting directions for future research.