Hamid Usefi
Department of Math and Statistics
Memorial University of Newfoundland

Aspects of Homomorphic Encryption

Department of Computer Science
Thursday, March 26, 2015, 1:00 p.m., Room EN-2022

---

 

Abstract

Rivest, Shamir and Adleman through their invention of RSA cryptosystem in 1978 asked whether one can apply operations on the encrypted data so that when we decrypt the data it would be the same as if we apply the same operations on the raw data. They observed that RSA satisfies this property provided that the operations we apply consists only of multiplication. The ideal cryptosystem in this respect is the one that allows any operation consisting of both addition and multiplication and such cryptosystems are called homomorphic. The first breakthrough was made by Gentry in 2009 where he gave a blueprint of a possible homomorphic encryption. Since then his original idea has extensively been developed and refined to be able to use them in applications. In this talk I will review some of these developments and serious challenges still ahead and discuss applications of homomorphic encryption to smart grid and privacy- reserving searches.