Computing arbitrary functions of encrypted data

  • Authors:
  • Craig Gentry

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Suppose that you want to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. We show that this separation is possible: we describe a "fully homomorphic" encryption scheme that keeps data private, but that allows a worker that does not have the secret decryption key to compute any (still encrypted) result of the data, even when the function of the data is very complex. In short, a third party can perform complicated processing of data without being able to see it. Among other things, this helps make cloud computing compatible with privacy.