The Fact and Fiction of Homomorphic Encryption

January 22nd 2019, By Ameesh Divatia

The approach's promise continues to entice cryptographers and academics. But don't expect it to help in the real world anytime soon.

The history of homomorphic encryption stretches back to the late 1970s. Just a year after the RSA public-key scheme was developed, Ron Rivest, Len Adleman, and Michael Dertouzos published a report called "On Data Banks and Privacy Homomorphisms." The paper detailed how a loan company, for example, could use a cloud provider (then known as a commercial time-sharing service) to store and compute encrypted data. This influential paper led to the term "homomorphic encryption."

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