In A World Of Privacy: The Time Has Come For Paillier Encryption To Step Forward
The number of single-author papers is very low these days, but there is one paper from the past that is really making an impact in the world of cybersecurity [here]:
Overall, it has been a slow burner:
The reason that Paillier has not had a massive impact on public-key systems is that RSA and ECC have cornered the market for public-key encryption. But, we now see the rise of homomorphic encryption, and where we can operate on encrypted values in an arithmetic way. Unfortunately, RSA and ECC are not really set up for these types of operations, and the current full homomorphic encryption (FHE) methods are just so slow. So, in steps the Paillier method with its partial homomorphic encryption (PHE) methods. While it only does add/subtract and scalar multiply, it fits into many privacy-preserving use cases. For example, we could implement a COVID-19 tracking application by taking encrypted time stamps, and then determining the difference between them…
