TC: Small: Collaborative Research: Implications of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

最近，Gentry 等人确立了构建完全同态加密方案的可行性。简而言之，完全同态加密 (FHE) 方案允许拥有多个消息的密文的第三方在不知道解密密钥的情况下构造一个新的密文，该密文对应于应用于原始消息的任意有效可计算函数。 完全同态加密有可能允许不同的组织在其池数据集上计算基本函数，而无需向彼此泄露这些数据。 因此，它是实现“需要知道”隐私的最终解决方案。在 Gentry 发现之前，很少有研究人员相信可以构建 FHE。因此，尽管该概念具有以保护隐私的方式解决重要任务的明显潜力，但尚未得到充分研究。特别是，FHE 和传统公钥密码学之间的基本关系仍不清楚。该研究项目的目标是使这种关系正式化，建立 FHE 的概念，即使对手可以访问受限制的解密预言机，也能满足更强大的安全保证，例如安全性，并可能利用这些更强的安全保证将 FHE 应用于安全和隐私保护计算中。为了确保研究的更广泛影响，该项目包括对从本科生到博士后的各个级别的学生进行指导，并向传统上代表性不足的学生和 K-12 学生开展外展活动。该项目的研究成果将通过会议、期刊和互联网上的演示和出版物进行传播。

Recently, Gentry and others have established the feasibility of constructing fully homomorphic encryption schemes. Briefly, a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme is one that allows a third-party who has ciphertexts of several messages to construct---without knowing the decryption key---a new ciphertext that corresponds to an arbitrary efficiently computable function applied to the original messages. Fully homomorphic encryption has the potential to allow disparate organizations to compute basic functions on their pooled data-sets without revealing such data to each other. It is thus an ultimate solution for implementing ``need-to-know'' privacy.Until Gentry's discovery, few researchers believed that FHE could be constructed. As a result, the concept has not been well-studied despite its clear potential to solve important tasks in a privacy-preserving manner. In particular, the basic relationship between FHE and traditional public-key cryptography remains unclear. The goals of this research project are to formalize this relationship, to build notions of FHE that satisfy stronger security guarantees such as security even when the adversary has access to a restricted decryption oracle, and to potentially use these stronger security guarantees to apply FHE in secure and privacy preserving computation.To ensure the broader impact of the research, this project includes mentoring of students at all levels from undergraduate to post-doctoral and outreach activities to traditionally under-represented students and K-12 students. Research from this project will be disseminated through presentations and publications in conferences, journals and on the Internet.