[1] Redmond

The first meeting was held on 13-14 July 2017 at Microsoft Research.

This workshop brought together members of the Homomorphic Encryption (HE) community to spend two days working together toward a plan for standardization.

Homomorphic encryption schemes which can handle one “operation” have been known for a long time, such as RSA, Paillier, or BGN which can do a little bit more. With the breakthrough work by Gentry in 2009, the community embarked on a new direction, basing “Fully” Homomorphic Encryption Schemes on hard lattice problems. Now, 8 years later, we have multiple robust HE libraries available (HElib, SEAL, NFLlib, Palisade), which use schemes such as BGV and FV. With new optimizations and clever encoding techniques, they allow an amazing amount of practical computation to be done on encrypted data. Projects such as CryptoNets have already proved the feasibility of machine learning applications on encrypted data; the iDASH 2015 and 2016 competitions demonstrated computations on encrypted genomic data such as edit distance and string matching. Most applications follow the “leveled” approach, where parameters are set to allow the evaluation of limited—but arbitrarily high – depth circuits, making the computations practical, and avoiding costly bootstrapping operations. For that reason, we drop the word “Fully”, and simply refer to the area as Homomorphic Encryption (HE).

This workshop aimed to leverage this progress and to galvanize the community toward a common approach to standardization of Homomorphic Encryption.

Agenda

Day 1 – July 13, 2017

Day 2 – July 14, 2017

Organizers

• Kristin Lauter, Microsoft Research
• Kim Laine, Microsoft Research
• Kurt Rohloff, New Jersey Institute of Technology
• Lily Chen, National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Roy Zimmermann, Microsoft Research

Attendees

Microsoft

• David Carroll, Microsoft Azure
• Melissa Chase, Microsoft Research
• Hao Chen, Microsoft Research
• Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Microsoft Research
• Ranjit Kumaresan, Microsoft Research
• Kim Laine, Microsoft Research
• Kristin Lauter, Microsoft Research
• Satya Lokam, Microsoft Research India
• Roy Zimmermann, Microsoft Research Outreach

Microsoft Interns

• Kyoohyung Han, Seoul National University
• Zhicong Huang, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
• Amir Jalali, Florida Atlantic University
• Travis Morrison, Pennsylvania State University

Government Agencies

• Lily Chen, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
• Roger Hallman, SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific
• Dustin Moody, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
• Heidi Sofia, National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)

Industry

• David Archer, Galois
• Shai Halevi, IBM
• Alex Malozemoff, Galois
• Pascal Paillier, Crypto Experts

Academia

• Brad Malin, Vanderbilt University-GenoPri
• Michael Brenner, University of Hannover
• Jung Hee Cheon, Seoul National University
• Wei Dai, Worchester Polytechnic Institute
• Jintai Ding, University of Cincinnati
• Shafi Goldwasser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Sergey Gorbunov, University of Waterloo
• Jeffrey Hoffstein, Brown University
• Xiaoqian Jiang, University of California at San Diego-iDASH
• Miran Kim, University of California at San Diego
• Yuriy Polyakov, New Jersey Institute of Technology
• Kurt Rohloff, New Jersey Institute of Technology
• Amit Sahai, University of California at Los Angeles
• Erkay Savas, Sabanci University
• Yongsoo Song, Seoul National University
• Berk Sunar, Worchester Polytechnic Institute
• Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Shuang Wang, University of California at San Diego-iDASH

White Papers

These white papers were drafted by three working groups at the workshop:

• APIs: This white paper discusses the design of API standards for homomorphic encryption.
• Security: This white paper discusses the security standards for homomorphic encryption.
• Applications: This white paper discusses the motivating applications for homomorphic encryption.

In the News

To Protect Genetic Privacy, Encrypt your DNA, Wired, August 23, 2017 Changing the security landscape for entrepreneurs, TechCrunch, August 17, 2017