Modern Homomorphic Encryption: Introduction

homomorphic encryption (HE) is a cryptographic primitive that provides unique security guarantees in the privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) ecosystem. In Chap. 1 , we discussed some privacy aspects that affect data science applications. The HE primitive can solve some of these privacy issues. This chapter dives into the properties and capabilities of modern HE schemes, how to use them, and their unique features and limitations. The goal of this chapter is mainly to introduce the HE terminology and the jargon, which are used throughout this book. In general, the book attempts to consider the HE primitive as a black box that provides a predefined set of APIs that application developers, applied cryptographers, and data scientists can use. For completeness, Sect. 2.5 includes some advanced HE topics that may help readers gain further understanding of the lower-level implementation details of some modern HE schemes.