Sharing Data Homomorphically Encrypted with Different Encryption Keys
This addresses the challenge of secure data sharing in cloud environments for users with different encryption keys, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing homomorphic encryption concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of sharing homomorphically encrypted data under different keys without a trusted third party, proposing a proxy re-encryption scheme that allows remote processing and achieves this by computing encrypted differences without decryption or extra communication.
In this paper, we propose the first homomorphic based proxy re-encryption (HPRE) solution that allows different users to share data they outsourced homomorphically encrypted using their respective public keys with the possibility to process such data remotely. More clearly, this scheme makes possible to switch the public encryption key to another one without the help of a trusted third party. Its originality stands on a method we propose so as to compute the difference between two encrypted data without decrypting them and with no extra communications. Basically, in our HPRE scheme, the two users, the delegator and the delegate, ask the cloud server to generate an encrypted noise based on a secret key, both users previously agreed on. Based on our solution for comparing encrypted data, the cloud computes in clear the differences in-between the encrypted noise and the encrypted data of the delegator, obtaining thus blinded data. By next the cloud encrypts these differences with the public key of the delegate. As the noise is also known of the delegate, this one just has to remove it to get access to the data encrypted with his public key. This solution has been experimented in the case of the sharing of images outsourced into a semihonest cloud server.