Section: Research Program

Advanced Encryption

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has become a very active research area since 2009, when IBM announced the discovery of a FHE scheme by Craig Gentry. FHE allows to perform any computation on encrypted data, yielding the result encrypted under the same key. This enables outsourcing computation in the Cloud, on encrypted data, so the Cloud provider does not learn any information. However, FHE does not allow to share the result.

Functional encryption is another recent tool that allows an authority to deliver functional decryption keys, for any function $f$ of his choice, so that when applied to the encryption of a message $m$, the functional decryption key yields $f\left(m\right)$. Since $m$ can be a large vector, $f$ can be an aggregation or statistical function: on encrypted data, one can get the result $f\left(m\right)$ in clear.

While this functionality has initially been defined in theory, our team has been very active in designing concrete instantiations for practical purposes.