Abstract
Encryption is very effective at protecting the secrecy of data at rest (storage) and in transit (networks). Could it also protect it during computations on this data? We will introduce the notion of homomorphic encryption, enabling computation on encrypted data without having the decryption key, and outline Gentry's (2009) approach, the first realization of this concept. Homomorphic encryption, along with other cryptographic protocols, provides solutions to the problem of secure multiparty computation, where participants together compute a function of their private data without revealing anything more than the final result.
