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Nitesh Emmadi

Researcher, TCS R&I

Harika Narumanchi

Researcher, TCS R&I

Rajan MA

Scientist, TCS R&I

Preserving the privacy of data stored on the cloud with the help of homomorphic encryption

Homomorphic encryption (HE) allows computation on encrypted data without decryption, preserving privacy in almost all possible scenarios. Applications of HE in cybersecurity are as follows:

  • HE prevents service providers from learning user queries, while still permitting them to serve users with relevant results. Processed queries return encrypted results to users without disclosing information to search engines
  • With HE, it is possible to encrypt data on a database, while still allowing processing on the data with minimal leakage. Only authorized users with a relevant secret key can access data from the database
  • Computation on encrypted data eliminates trust issues with cloud service providers. The cloud can host applications dealing with encrypted data without needing to access plaintexts, ensuring user and enterprise privacy

HE can train statistical models with encrypted data. It can also safeguard sensitive genomic data used by healthcare services