When communicating sensitive, confidential, or personal information over the Internet, encryption is a vital privacy tool. Even if hackers, cybercriminals, etc. are able to intercept it before it reaches its intended recipients, encryption scrambles plain text into a form of secret code that hackers or cybercriminals can’t decipher. When the communication reaches its intended recipients, they will have their own key to decode the data into plain, readable language. As a result, encryption can help protect the information you send, receive, and store on a device. Text messages on your smartphone, jogging records on your fitness watch, and financial information provided through your online account are all examples. This article will discuss two new emerging techniques of encryption which are homomorphic & polymorphic encryption. It will also discuss the uses of these techniques and how these differ from common techniques in terms of efficiency and safety.

Homomorphic Encryption and its uses

The difficulty with encrypting data is that you’ll have to decrypt it sooner or later. Furthermore, decrypting data exposes it to hackers. You can encrypt your cloud files with a secret key, but once you want to do something with them—anything from editing a word document to searching a database of financial data—you must unlock the data and expose it. Homomorphic encryption, a breakthrough in cryptography, has the potential to change that. 

The goal of homomorphic encryption is to make it possible to compute on encrypted data. As a result, data can stay private while being analyzed, allowing beneficial tasks to be completed with data stored in untrustworthy contexts. This is a highly valuable capability in a world of distributed processing and heterogeneous networking. A homomorphic cryptosystem is similar to other types of public encryption in that it encrypts data with a public key and only allows the person with the matching private key to view the decrypted data. The fact that it uses an algebraic system to let you or others to do a range of computations (or operations) on the encrypted data sets it distinct from other types of encryption.

Types of Homomorphic Encryption

Homomorphic encryption is divided into three categories. The main distinction is between the types and frequency of mathematical operations that can be done on the ciphertext. The three types are as follows:

1. Partially Homomorphic Encryption – Only a few mathematical functions can be performed on encrypted values with partially homomorphic encryption (PHE). This indicates that the ciphertext can only perform one operation, either addition or multiplication, an endless number of times. PHE with multiplicative operations is the basis for RSA encryption, which is widely used in SSL/TLS connections.

2. Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption – A somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE) system allows for select operations (either addition or multiplication) up to a particular level of complexity, but only a limited number of times.

3. Fully Homomorphic Encryption – Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), while still in the development stage, has a lot of potential for making functionality consistent with privacy by helping to keep information secure and accessible at the same time. Developed from the SHE scheme, FHE is capable of using both addition and multiplication any number of times and makes secure multi-party computation more efficient. Unlike other forms of homomorphic encryption, it can handle arbitrary computations on your ciphertexts.

Uses of Homomorphic Encryption:

Several practical uses of FHE have already been identified by researchers, some of which are discussed here:

1. Keeping Data Safe in the Cloud – You can safeguard the data you store in the cloud while keeping the ability to calculate and search ciphered information that you can subsequently decode without jeopardizing the data’s integrity.

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