Towards Real-World Private Computations with Homomorphic Encryption: Current Solutions and Open Challenges

There is an increasing need to share sensitive information within and beyond organisations. Protecting this information is vital for commercial and regulatory reasons. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) has come to the fore as a mechanism to enable the sharing of confidential data in a secure and private manner. Multiple open-source libraries are now publicly available, providing organisations with the tools to utilise the advantages of HE. While research devoted much effort to the academic and cryptographic aspects of HE schemes, research explicitly focusing on real-world financial applications is comparably rare. There is a need to provide a comparative analysis and related benchmarking of the most suitable HE libraries, having fixed the functional and non-functional requirements of the enterprise application of interest. We consider the motivation and background for HE and discuss the most promising open-source HE libraries. Having introduced real-world use cases in a financial context, we then illustrate outstanding challenges and how we plan to circumvent open points, introducing HELT (Homomorphic Encryption Libraries Toolkit).