WPEC 2024 Talk 2b1: Overview of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an encryption scheme that allows to perform arbitrary computations on encrypted data. In this talk I will present an overview of FHE, covering the functionality, security properties, and main approaches to the design of FHE schemes. The presentation will focus on the security guarantees offered by current FHE schemes, how these guarantees may or may not fit specific application settings, and research directions currently being investigated to make FHE more robust, efficient and widely applicable. Specific topics covered in the talk include security against passive and active attacks, the security of exact vs approximate computations, the distributed decryption problem, and a recently introduced notion of "application aware" security.

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