Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.

Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning

Legacy encryption systems depend on sharing a key (public or private) among the peers involved in exchanging an encrypted message. However, this approach poses privacy concerns. The users or service providers with the key have exclusive rights on the data. Especially with popular cloud services, control over the privacy of the sensitive data is lost. Even when the keys are not shared, the encrypted material is shared with a third party that does not necessarily need to access the content. Moreover, untrusted servers, providers, and cloud operators can keep identifying elements of users long after users end the relationship with the services. Indeed, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), a special kind of encryption scheme, can address these concerns as it allows any third party to operate on the encrypted data without decrypting it in advance. Although this extremely useful feature of the HE scheme has been known for over 30 years, the first plausible and achievable Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme, which allows any computable function to perform on the encrypted data, was introduced by Craig Gentry in 2009. Even though this was a major achievement, different implementations so far demonstrated that FHE still needs to be improved significantly to be practical on every platform. Therefore, this survey focuses on HE and FHE schemes. First, we present the basics of HE and the details of the well-known Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) and Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SWHE), which are important pillars for achieving FHE. Then, the main FHE families, which have become the base for the other follow-up FHE schemes, are presented. Furthermore, the implementations and recent improvements in Gentry-type FHE schemes are also surveyed. Finally, further research directions are discussed. This survey is intended to give a clear knowledge and foundation to researchers and practitioners interested in knowing, applying, and extending the state-of-the-art HE, PHE, SWHE, and FHE systems.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3214303

A Survey on Homomorphic Encryption Schemes: Theory and Implementation

Contact tracing is an essential tool for public health officials and local communities to fight the spread of novel diseases, such as for the COVID-19 pandemic. The Singaporean government just released a mobile phone app, TraceTogether, that is designed to assist health officials in tracking down exposures after an infected individual is identified. However, there are important privacy implications of the existence of such tracking apps. Here, we analyze some of those implications and discuss ways of ameliorating the privacy concerns without decreasing usefulness to public health. We hope in writing this document to ensure that privacy is a central feature of conversations surrounding mobile contact tracing apps and to encourage community efforts to develop alternative effective solutions with stronger privacy protection for the users. Importantly, though we discuss potential modifications, this document is not meant as a formal research paper, but instead is a response to some of the privacy characteristics of direct contact tracing apps like TraceTogether and an early-stage Request for Comments to the community. 
Date written: 2020-03-24 
Minor correction: 2020-03-30

Contact Tracing Mobile Apps for COVID-19: Privacy Considerations and Related Trade-offs

Legacy encryption systems depend on sharing a key (public or private) among the peers involved in exchanging an encrypted message. However, this approach poses privacy concerns. Especially with popular cloud services, the control over the privacy of the sensitive data is lost. Even when the keys are not shared, the encrypted material is shared with a third party that does not necessarily need to access the content. Moreover, untrusted servers, providers, and cloud operators can keep identifying elements of users long after users end the relationship with the services. Indeed, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), a special kind of encryption scheme, can address these concerns as it allows any third party to operate on the encrypted data without decrypting it in advance. Although this extremely useful feature of the HE scheme has been known for over 30 years, the first plausible and achievable Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme, which allows any computable function to perform on the encrypted data, was introduced by Craig Gentry in 2009. Even though this was a major achievement, different implementations so far demonstrated that FHE still needs to be improved significantly to be practical on every platform. First, we present the basics of HE and the details of the well-known Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) and Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SWHE), which are important pillars of achieving FHE. Then, the main FHE families, which have become the base for the other follow-up FHE schemes are presented. Furthermore, the implementations and recent improvements in Gentry-type FHE schemes are also surveyed. Finally, further research directions are discussed. This survey is intended to give a clear knowledge and foundation to researchers and practitioners interested in knowing, applying, as well as extending the state of the art HE, PHE, SWHE, and FHE systems.

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers, and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city.” Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities.

Privacy in the Smart City—Applications, Technologies, Challenges, and Solutions

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a cryptosystem which supports computation on encrypted data. Lo pez-Alt et al. (STOC 2012) proposed a generalized notion of HE, called Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption (MKHE), which is capable of performing arithmetic operations on ciphertexts encrypted under different keys. In this paper, we present multi-key variants of two HE schemes with packed ciphertexts. We present new relinearization algorithms which are simpler and faster than previous method by Chen et al. (TCC 2017). We then generalize the bootstrapping techniques for HE to obtain multi-key fully homomorphic encryption schemes. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of both MKHE schemes using Microsoft SEAL. For example, when the dimension of base ring is 8192, homomorphic multiplication between multi-key BFV (resp. CKKS) ciphertexts associated with four parties followed by a relinearization takes about 116 (resp. 67) milliseconds. Our MKHE schemes have a wide range of applications in secure computation between multiple data providers. As a benchmark, we homomorphically classify an image using a pre-trained neural network model, where input data and model are encrypted under different keys. Our implementation takes about 1.8 seconds to evaluate one convolutional layer followed by two fully connected layers on an encrypted image from the MNIST dataset.

Efficient Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption with Packed Ciphertexts with Application to Oblivious Neural Network Inference

With the rapid increase in cloud computing, concerns surrounding data privacy, security, and confidentiality also have been increased significantly. Not only cloud providers are susceptible to internal and external hacks, but also in some scenarios, data owners cannot outsource the computation due to privacy laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a groundbreaking invention in cryptography that, unlike traditional cryptosystems, enables computation on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. However, the most critical obstacle in deploying FHE at large-scale is the enormous computation overhead. In this paper, we present HEAX, a novel hardware architecture for FHE that achieves unprecedented performance improvements. HEAX leverages multiple levels of parallelism, ranging from ciphertext-level to fine-grained modular arithmetic level. Our first contribution is a new highly-parallelizable architecture for number-theoretic transform (NTT) which can be of independent interest as NTT is frequently used in many lattice-based cryptography systems. Building on top of NTT engine, we design a novel architecture for computation on homomorphically encrypted data. Our implementation on reconfigurable hardware demonstrates 164-268× performance improvement for a wide range of FHE parameters.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373376.3378523

HEAX: An Architecture for Computing on Encrypted Data

With the rapid increase in cloud computing, concerns surrounding data privacy, security, and confidentiality also have been increased significantly. Not only cloud providers are susceptible to internal and external hacks, but also in some scenarios, data owners cannot outsource the computation due to privacy laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a groundbreaking invention in cryptography that, unlike traditional cryptosystems, enables computation on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. However, the most critical obstacle in deploying FHE at large-scale is the enormous computation overhead. 
In this paper, we present HEAX, a novel hardware architecture for FHE that achieves unprecedented performance improvement. HEAX leverages multiple levels of parallelism, ranging from ciphertext-level to fine-grained modular arithmetic level. Our first contribution is a new highly-parallelizable architecture for number-theoretic transform (NTT) which can be of independent interest as NTT is frequently used in many lattice-based cryptography systems. Building on top of NTT engine, we design a novel architecture for computation on homomorphically encrypted data. We also introduce several techniques to enable an end-to-end, fully pipelined design as well as reducing on-chip memory consumption. Our implementation on reconfigurable hardware demonstrates 164-268x performance improvement for a wide range of FHE parameters.

We introduce a CUDA GPU library to accelerate evaluations with homomorphic schemes defined over polynomial rings enabled with a number of optimizations including algebraic techniques for efficient evaluation, memory minimization techniques, memory and thread scheduling and low level CUDA hand-tuned assembly optimizations to take full advantage of the mass parallelism and high memory bandwidth GPUs offer. The arithmetic functions constructed to handle very large polynomial operands using number-theoretic transform (NTT) and Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) based methods are then extended to implement the primitives of the leveled homomorphic encryption scheme proposed by Lopez-Alt, Tromer and Vaikuntanathan. To compare the performance of the proposed CUDA library we implemented two applications: the Prince block cipher and homomorphic sorting algorithms on two GPU platforms in single GPU and multiple GPU configurations. We observed a speedup of 25 times and 51 times over the best previous GPU implementation for Prince with single and triple GPUs, respectively. Similarly for homomorphic sorting we obtained 12–41 times speedup depending on the number and size of the sorted elements.

/pdf/cuhe-a-homomorphic-encryption-accelerator-library-gipls10ir2.pdf

cuHE: A Homomorphic Encryption Accelerator Library

We introduce a large polynomial arithmetic library optimized for Nvidia GPUs to support fully homomorphic encryption schemes. To realize the large polynomial arithmetic library we convert polynomials with large coefficients using the Chinese Remainder Theorem into many polynomials with small coefficients, and then carry out modular multiplications in the residue space using a custom developed discrete Fourier transform library. We further extend the library to support the homomorphic evaluation operations, i.e. addition, multiplication, and relinearization, in an NTRU based somewhat homomorphic encryption library. Finally, we put the library to use to evaluate homomorphic evaluation of two block ciphers: Prince and AES, which show 2.57 times and 7.6 times speedup, respectively, over an Intel Xeon software implementation.

/pdf/accelerating-ntru-based-homomorphic-encryption-using-gpus-2dvvasa00w.pdf

Wei Dai

Papers

Efficient Multi-Key Homomorphic Encryption with Packed Ciphertexts with Application to Oblivious Neural Network Inference

HEAX: An Architecture for Computing on Encrypted Data

HEAX: An Architecture for Computing on Encrypted Data

cuHE: A Homomorphic Encryption Accelerator Library

Accelerating NTRU based homomorphic encryption using GPUs