Recent Advances in Homomorphic Encryption: A Possible Future for Signal Processing in the Encrypted Domain

Since the introduction of the notion of privacy homomorphism by Rivest et al. in the late 1970s, the design of efficient and secure encryption schemes allowing the performance of general computations in the encrypted domain has been one of the holy grails of the cryptographic community. Despite numerous partial answers, the problem of designing such a powerful primitive has remained open until the theoretical breakthrough of the fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme published by Gentry in the late 2000s. Since then, progress has been fast-paced, and it can now be reasonably said that practical homomorphic encryption-based computing will become a reality in the near future.