Overview of open source (F)HE libraries
Sikoba Research has recently published an Overview of open source libraries for Fully Homomorphic Encryption. This report is a guest contribution by Oussama Amine, who is currently a PhD candidate in Mathematics at the University of Oslo.
Since the seminal work of Gentry [Gen09], the field of cryptography has witnessed a very active decade both in terms of the development of new theoretical results related in one way or another to FHE as well as implementations of practical schemes. Practicality refers not only to the feasibility (in terms of time/space resources) of running toy examples (e.g. addition of 4 numbers homomorphically) but more recently to the fact that the technology has reached a stage of maturity where real world applications can be envisioned using it. Here we have in mind last year’s iDASH competition and the proposed solutions (e.g. https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/145.pdf) for the Secure Parallel Genome-Wide Association Studies using Homomorphic Encryption track.
As of today, several open-source (F)HE libraries are available each implementing one or several of the state of the art schemes. In order to summarize, to a certain extent, the the state of affairs, we have made a short report on some of the important libraries available where we report on some high-level features that make up the differences between them.
Homomorphic encryption schemes can be roughly separated into first generation schemes that suffer exponential growth of noise, second generation that tackle the noise issue and have practical implementations and third generation that introduce new techniques based on matrices which makes many of the optimization developed for generation-two schemes non compatible.
The report analyses the following libraries:
- Seal is a Microsoft library which was made open source towards the end of 2018. It has no dependencies and implements two (levelled) second-generation Homomorphic schemes.
- HElib is an IBM library which supports some second-generation schemes
- PALISADE is a general-purpose library providing implementations of various cryptography building blocks including second-generation homomorphic encryption, making it a a versatile library.
- TFHE is a library implementing a third-generation bootstrapping scheme
Sikoba Research developes the isekai verifiable computation software, with the goal of making zero knowledge proofs accessible to mainstream IT developers. For more information, please visit https://research.sikoba.com and https://github.com/sikoba/isekai.
References and Links
[Gen09] Gentry, Craig. “Fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices.” Stoc. Vol. 9. №2009. 2009.
[iDash] iDASH Privacy & Security Workshop http://www.humangenomeprivacy.org
