A few years ago, talking about homomorphic encryption in a business context would elicit either blank stares or sighs. Those who were familiar with it recognized its paradigm-shifting potential, and others were just curious about its potential and its computational practicality. But now, the world is very close to full-scale adoption of homomorphic encryption—a technology that remains loyal to what every user is after: privacy. This article outlines why homomorphic encryption could be the answer for businesses that need to process high data volumes while protecting privacy and security.
What Is Homomorphic Encryption?
Although the technology has been around for more than 40 years, recent breakthroughs have made it practical for a wide range of commercial applications.
Homomorphic encryption refers to a class of encryption methods that allows computation to be performed directly on encrypted data without requiring access to the secret key. Such computations remain in encrypted form, and can be revealed by the owner of the secret key.
In a paper published by the University of Mannheim, the authors call the development of fully homomorphic encryption a “revolutionary advance, greatly extending the scope of the computations”.
“The purpose of homomorphic encryption is to allow computation on encrypted data. This data can remain confidential while it is processed, enabling useful tasks to be accomplished with data residing in untrusted environments. In a world of distributed computation and heterogeneous networking, this is a hugely valuable capability. Finding a general method for computing on encrypted data had been a goal in cryptography since it was proposed in 1978 by Rivest, Adleman and Dertouzos. Interest in this topic is due to its numerous applications in the real world. The development of fully homomorphic encryption is a revolutionary advance, greatly extending the scope of the computations which can be applied to process encrypted data homomorphically”, according to A Guide to Fully Homomorphic Encryption.
How Safe Is Homomorphic Encryption?
With homomorphic encryption, data is securely stored in the cloud while allowing the ability to compute and search encrypted information. In an ideal environment, only the user who owns the data in the cloud would have the ability to decrypt the data and the results of homomorphic encryption.
Modern key cryptography is extremely secure. However, human error is still the biggest factor in most security problems. An error in handling a private key can expose it to outside parties, making encryption useless.
Is fully homomorphic encryption available? Yes! Fully homomorphic encryption means the algorithm allows an infinite number of additions or multiplications of ciphertexts. In the ideal scenario, the cloud can perform computations on behalf of the user and return only the encrypted results.
Is Homomorphic Encryption Fast or Slow?
Homomorphic encryption allows computation to be performed on encrypted data without decrypting it—an approach that, until now, has been plagued by poor performance compared to operations conducted on unencrypted data.
Despite the recent breakthroughs that have now made it practical for a wide range of commercial applications, the main problem with fully homomorphic encryption today is that it’s simply not efficient enough. Meeting the requirements of full homomorphism involves slow algorithms that may take up a massive amount of storage capacity. In 2018, IBM released an improved version of its HElib C++ library for homomorphic encryption. The new version is 25–75 times faster than the previous version—which was 2 million times faster than the original version.
In September 2021, IBM announced the introduction of fully homomorphic encryption on IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers, targeting mainly financial institutions and other organizations in regulated industries.
Main Applications of Homomorphic Encryption
The ability to perform calculations on encrypted data has the potential to solve many business challenges faced by companies from different industries.
As IBM experts have pointed out, the new technology could benefit financial institutions, and businesses that are restricted from sharing sensitive data due to both external regulations and internal policies. Homomorphic encryption can also help a logistic company protect itself against supply chain risks. Tech companies obtaining revenues by collecting information about their users and selling this information to third parties can also benefit from homomorphic encryption. Thanks to this new technology, businesses can perform data analytics without viewing or accessing the original data.
Conclusion
For any company planning to adopt a hybrid cloud model, security must be a key element of decisional frameworks. With homomorphic encryption, organizations can process sensitive data while maintaining privacy and compliance controls.
