Title: Making data in cloud secure and usable: fully homomorphic encryption with symmetric keys

Authors: Iti Sharma; C.P. Gupta

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Rajasthan Technical University, Kota-324010, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Rajasthan Technical University, Kota-324010, India

Abstract: Today, cloud offers unlimited computing capabilities at affordable price. However, securing data in cloud ensuring usability and availability of data presents a challenge. Benefits promised by cloud computing cannot be availed fully until security issues are properly addressed. Homomorphic encryption ensures data security during computation as well. Most of the currently available homomorphic encryption schemes are based on public key cryptosystems causing large overhead. We propose a symmetric key encryption scheme with fully homomorphic evaluation capabilities, applicable even in multiuser environment. We also present a protocol for using the proposed scheme to private data processing in clouds. The proposed scheme requires a key size linearly proportional to security parameter causing computational overhead proportional to security parameter.

Keywords: homomorphic encryption; computation delegation; private data processing; cloud computing; data aggregation; sensor networks; data security; cloud security; data usability; symmetric keys; cryptography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2015.069673

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2015 Vol.14 No.4, pp.379 - 399

Received: 17 Sep 2013
Accepted: 17 Aug 2014

Published online: 29 May 2015 *

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