Website: http://homomorphicencryption.org/ (opens in new tab)
This workshop brought together members of the Homomorphic Encryption (HE) community (opens in new tab) to spend two days working together toward a plan for standardization.
Homomorphic encryption schemes which can handle one “operation” have been known for a long time, such as RSA, Paillier, or BGN which can do a little bit more. With the breakthrough work by Gentry in 2009, the community embarked on a new direction, basing “Fully” Homomorphic Encryption Schemes on hard lattice problems. Now, 8 years later, we have multiple robust HE libraries available (HElib, SEAL, NFLlib, Palisade), which use schemes such as BGV and FV. With new optimizations and clever encoding techniques, they allow an amazing amount of practical computation to be done on encrypted data. Projects such as CryptoNets have already proved the feasibility of machine learning applications on encrypted data; the iDASH 2015 and 2016 competitions demonstrated computations on encrypted genomic data such as edit distance and string matching. Most applications follow the “leveled” approach, where parameters are set to allow the evaluation of limited—but arbitrarily high – depth circuits, making the computations practical, and avoiding costly bootstrapping operations. For that reason, we drop the word “Fully”, and simply refer to the area as Homomorphic Encryption (HE).
This workshop aimed to leverage this progress and to galvanize the community toward a common approach to standardization of Homomorphic Encryption.
Organizers
Kristin Lauter (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Kim Laine (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Kurt Rohloff, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Lily Chen, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Roy Zimmermann (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Attendees
Microsoft
David Carroll, Microsoft Azure
Melissa Chase (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Hao Chen (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Ran Gilad-Bachrach (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Ranjit Kumaresan (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Kim Laine (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Kristin Lauter (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research
Satya Lokam (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research India
Roy Zimmermann (opens in new tab), Microsoft Research Outreach
Microsoft Interns
Kyoohyung Han, Seoul National University
Zhicong Huang, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Amir Jalali, Florida Atlantic University
Travis Morrison, Pennsylvania State University
Government Agencies
Lily Chen, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Roger Hallman, SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific
Dustin Moody, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Heidi Sofia, National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)
Industry
David Archer, Galois
Shai Halevi, IBM
Alex Malozemoff, Galois
Pascal Paillier, Crypto Experts
Academia
Brad Malin, Vanderbilt University-GenoPri
Michael Brenner, University of Hannover
Jung Hee Cheon, Seoul National University
Wei Dai, Worchester Polytechnic Institute
Jintai Ding, University of Cincinnati
Shafi Goldwasser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sergey Gorbunov, University of Waterloo
Jeffrey Hoffstein, Brown University
Xiaoqian Jiang, University of California at San Diego-iDASH
Miran Kim, University of California at San Diego
Yuriy Polyakov, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Kurt Rohloff, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Amit Sahai, University of California at Los Angeles
Erkay Savas, Sabanci University
Yongsoo Song, Seoul National University
Berk Sunar, Worchester Polytechnic Institute
Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Shuang Wang, University of California at San Diego-iDASH
White Papers
These white papers were drafted by three working groups at the workshop:
APIs (opens in new tab): This white paper discusses the design of API standards for homomorphic encryption.
Security (opens in new tab): This white paper discusses the security standards for homomorphic encryption.
Applications (opens in new tab): This white paper discusses the motivating applications for homomorphic encryption.
In the News
To Protect Genetic Privacy, Encrypt your DNA (opens in new tab), Wired, August 23, 2017
Changing the security landscape for entrepreneurs (opens in new tab), TechCrunch, August 17, 2017