A New Scalable Distributed Homomorphic Encryption Scheme for High Computational Complexity Models

Almaini, Amar; Folz, Jakob; Woelfl, Dominik; Al-Dubai, Ahmed; Schramm, Martin; Heigl, Michael

Abstract

Due to the increasing privacy demand in data processing, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has recently received growing attention for its ability to perform calculations over encrypted data. Since the data can be processed in encrypted form and the output remains encrypted, only an authorized user or a user who holds the key can decrypt the data and understand its meaning. Hence, it is possible to securely outsource data processing to untrustworthy but powerful public computing resources on the edge. However, due to the high computational complexity, FHE-based data processing experiences scalability related concerns. It is currently unclear whether FHE can be used to solve large-scale problems. In this paper, we propose a novel general distributed FHE-based data processing approach as a concrete step towards solving the scalability challenge. The main idea behind our approach is to use slightly more communication overhead for a shorter computing circuit in FHE, hence, reducing the overall complexity. We verify our new model’s efficiency and effectiveness by comparing the distributed approach with the central approach over various FHE schemes (CKKS, BGV, and BFV). This is performed using one of the more popular libraries of FHE “Microsoft SEAL”, by performing specific mathematical operations and observing the time consumed. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed approach results in a significant reduction in time, up to 54% compared to the traditional central approach.

Citation

Almaini, A., Folz, J., Woelfl, D., Al-Dubai, A., Schramm, M., & Heigl, M. (2023, June). A New Scalable Distributed Homomorphic Encryption Scheme for High Computational Complexity Models. Presented at International Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC 2023), Marrakesh, Morocco

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: International Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC 2023)
• Start Date: Jun 19, 2023
• End Date: Apr 23, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Mar 31, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Jul 21, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Apr 25, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 21, 2023
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Pages: 890-897
• Book Title: 2023 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/IWCMC58020.2023.10183131
• Keywords: Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Distributed Data Processing, Microsoft SEAL, Security, Edge Computing