New Applications of Homomorphic Cryptography

Abstract

Since Gentry's breakthrough construction of fully homomorphic encryption from lattice-based assumptions (STOC 2009), homomorphic cryptography has attracted a lot of attention. In short, homomorphic cryptography schemes allow performing computation on encrypted data without knowing anything about the underlying plaintext. This branch of cryptography has become increasingly useful in building new protocols and schemes with intriguing security and functionality features. In this thesis, we continue to study the applications of homomorphic cryptography and the lattice-based techniques underlying them in realizing new and enhanced cryptographic primitives. We obtain the following results: -We construct the first noninteractive zero knowledge argument (and proof) system for all of NP from standard lattice assumptions. Noninteractive zero knowledge argument systems have found many applications in enhancing the functionality as well as the security of cryptographic schemes and protocols. Constructing noninteractive zero knowledge arguments from lattice assumption has been a long standing open question. We finally close this problem. -We consider multi-key fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes. Traditional fully homomorphic encryption schemes allow computation on plaintext encrypted under a single key. The notion of multi-key fully homomorphic encryption allows homomorphic computation on data encrypted under different keys. We construct multi-key FHE schemes which are naturally dynamic: ciphertexts under new keys can join even during the homomorphic computation. -Finally, we focus on constrained pseudorandom functions (C-PRFs), which are pseudorandom functions (PRFs) with additional functional capabilities. We propose a new approach for building C-PRFs from lattices, and also significantly enhance the underlying lattice parameters.