PPOIM: Privacy-Preserving Shape Context Based Image Denoising and Matching with Efficient Outsourcing

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is pivotal for secure computation on encrypted data, crucial in privacy-preserving data analysis. However, efficiently processing high-dimensional data in FHE, especially for machine learning and statistical (ML/STAT) algorithms, poses a challenge. In this paper, we present an effective acceleration method using the kernel method for FHE schemes, enhancing time performance in ML/STAT algorithms within encrypted domains. This technique, independent of underlying FHE mechanisms and complementing existing optimizations, notably reduces costly FHE multiplications, offering near-constant time complexity relative to data dimension. Aimed at accessibility, this method is tailored for data scientists and developers with limited cryptography background, facilitating advanced data analysis in secure environments.

Outsourced pattern matching delegates the task of finding all positions pattern $P$ P appears in text $T$ T to the cloud from resource-constrained devices. Unfortunately, it has brought a series of security and privacy issues. Most of the state-of-the-art either disclosed text/pattern privacy or exploited the computationally-intensive techniques of public key fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), commitment schemes and zero knowledge proof to achieve both text/pattern privacy and verifiability. To address these issues, as a building block, an efficient privacy preserving verifiable outsourced discrete fourier transform protocol OVFT is first devised based on any one-way trapdoor permutation (OWTP). Based on OVFT, we propose an efficient secure verifiable outsourced polynomial multiplication protocol OPVML which is further exploited in designing our final protocol PVOPM for verifiable privacy-preserving outsourced pattern matching. Without exploiting public key FHE, the proposed PVOPM achieves both verifiability and text/pattern privacy against the collusion between the cloud and malicious receiver/sender, by generating authentication proofs of constant size and executing constant times of any one-way trapdoor permutation, independent to both the text size $n$ n and the pattern size $m$ m . Finally, formal security proof under universal composable (UC) model and extensive evaluations demonstrate the efficiency and practicability of our proposed PVOPM.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a cryptographic method that guarantees the privacy and security of user data during computation. FHE algorithms can perform unlimited arithmetic computations directly on encrypted data without decrypting it. Thus, even when processed by untrusted systems, confidential data is never exposed. In this work, we develop new techniques for accelerated encrypted execution and demonstrate the significant performance advantages of our approach. Our current focus is the Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus (CGGI) scheme, which is a current state-of-the-art method for evaluating arbitrary functions in the encrypted domain. CGGI represents a computation as a graph of homomorphic logic gates and each individual bit of the plaintext is transformed into a polynomial in the encrypted domain. Arithmetic on such data becomes very expensive: operations on bits become operations on entire polynomials. Therefore, evaluating even relatively simple nonlinear functions with the CGGI cryptosystem, such as a sigmoid, can take thousands of seconds on a single CPU thread. Using our novel framework for end-to-end accelerated encrypted execution called ArctyrEX, developers with no knowledge of complex FHE libraries can simply describe their computation as a C program that is evaluated 18x faster on average relative to the GPU-accelerated Concrete library for multiplication-intensive benchmarks.

We present new constructions of multi-party homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) based on a new primitive that we call homomorphic encryption with decryption to shares (HEDS). Our first construction, which we call \(\mathsf {Scooby} \), is based on many popular fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes with a linear decryption property. \(\mathsf {Scooby} \) achieves an n-party HSS for general circuits with complexity \(O(|F| + \log n)\), as opposed to \(O(n^2 \cdot |F|)\) for the prior best construction based on multi-key FHE. \(\mathsf {Scooby} \) can be based on (ring)-LWE with a super-polynomial modulus-to-noise ratio. In our second construction, \(\mathsf {Scrappy} \), assuming any generic FHE plus HSS for NC1-circuits, we obtain a HEDS scheme which does not require a super-polynomial modulus. While these schemes all require FHE, in another instantiation, \(\mathsf {Shaggy} \), we show how in some cases it is possible to obtain multi-party HSS without FHE, for a small number of parties and constant-degree polynomials. Finally, we show that our \(\mathsf {Scooby} \) scheme can be adapted to use multi-key fully homomorphic encryption, giving more efficient spooky encryption and setup-free HSS. This latter scheme, \(\mathsf {Casper} \), if concretely instantiated with a B/FV-style multi-key FHE scheme, for functions F which do not require bootstrapping, gives an HSS complexity of \(O(n \cdot |F| + n^2 \cdot \log n)\).

Adopting mobile healthcare network (MHN) services such as disease detection is fraught with concerns about the security and privacy of the entities involved and the resource restrictions at the Internet of Things (IoT) nodes. Hence, the essential requirements for disease detection services are to (i) produce accurate and fast disease detection without jeopardizing the privacy of health clouds and medical users and (ii) reduce the computational and transmission overhead (energy consumption) of the IoT devices while maintaining the privacy. For privacy preservation of widely used neural network– (NN) based disease detection, existing literature suggests either computationally heavy public key fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), or secure multiparty computation, with a large number of interactions. Hence, the existing privacy-preserving NN schemes are energy consuming and not suitable for resource-constrained IoT nodes in MHN. This work proposes a lightweight, fully homomorphic, symmetric key FHE scheme (SkFhe) to address the issues involved in implementing privacy-preserving NN. Based on SkFhe, widely used non-linear activation functions ReLU and Leaky ReLU are implemented over the encrypted domain. Furthermore, based on the proposed privacy-preserving linear transformation and non-linear activation functions, an energy-efficient, accurate, and privacy-preserving NN is proposed. The proposed scheme guarantees privacy preservation of the health cloud’s NN model and medical user’s data. The experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed solution dramatically reduces the overhead in communication and computation at the user side compared to the existing schemes. Moreover, the improved energy efficiency at the user is accomplished with reduced diagnosis time without sacrificing classification accuracy.

There remain many difficult problems in computer vision research such as object recognition, three dimensional reconstruction, object tracking, etc. And the basis of solving these problems relies on image matching. The scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm has been widely used for image matching application. The SIFT algorithm can successfully extract the most descriptive feature points in given input images taken under different viewpoints. However, the performance of the original SIFT algorithm degrades under the influence of noise. We propose to modify the SIFT algorithm to produce better invariant feature points for image matching under noise. We also propose to employ the Earth mover's distance (EMD) as the measurement of similarity between two descriptors. We present extensive experiment results to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods in image matching under noise.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is the holy grail of encrypted communications. It opens the door to several advanced functionalities to overcome the security and trust issues of the IT world. After 2009, once Craig Gentry had shown that FHE could be achieved, a study in this field boomed, and significant improvement was made in identifying more efficient and realistic programs. FHE is primitive cryptography that enables arbitrary functions to be calculated via encrypted data. These systems are applicable in different ways since they permit users to encrypt their private information securely while still outsourcing the processing of protected data without fearing disclosing the real data. In 2012, LTV12 presented the first multi-key FHE system and demonstrated the possibility of using multi-key systems in somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE). Like in the one key context, there have been many advances in the field, but no effort has been made to develop the multi-key methods. This paper presents a discussion of FHE and MKFHE with a specific focus on the current techniques and three implementations, comprising the first in the multi-key setups, to the extent of our understanding.

Accelerating the development of a practical Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme is the goal of the DARPA PROCEED program. For the past year, this program has had as its focus the acceleration of various aspects of the FHE concept toward practical implementation and use. FHE would be a game-changing technology to enable secure, general computation on encrypted data, e.g., on untrusted off-site hardware. However, FHE will still require several orders of magnitude improvement in computation before it will be practical for widespread use. Recent theoretical breakthroughs demonstrated the existence of FHE schemes [1, 2], and to date much progress has been made in both algorithmic and implementation improvements. Specifically our contribution to the Proceed program has been the development of FPGA based hardware primitives to accelerate the computation on encrypted data using FHE based on lattice techniques [3]. Our project, SIPHER, has been using a state of the art tool-chain developed by Mathworks to implement VHDL code for FPGA circuits directly from Simulink models. Our baseline Homomorphic Encryption prototypes are developed directly in Matlab using the fixed point toolbox to perform the required integer arithmetic. Constant improvements in algorithms require us to be able to quickly implement them in a high level language such as Matlab. We reported on our initial results at HPEC 2011 [4]. In the past year, increases in algorithm complexity have introduced several new design requirements for our FPGA implementation. This report presents new Simulink primitives that had to be developed to deal with these new requirements.

Secure report is the problem of a client that retrieves all records matching specified attributes from a database table at the server (e.g. cloud), as in SQL SELECT queries, but where the query and the database are encrypted. Here, only the client has the secret key, but still the server is expected to compute and return the encrypted result. Secure report is theoretically possible with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). However, the current state-of-the-art solutions are realized by a polynomial of degree that is at least linear in the number m of records, which is too slow in practice even for very small databases. We present the first solution that is realized by a polynomial that attains degree independent of the number of records m, as well as the first implementation of an FHE solution to Secure report. This is by suggesting a novel paradigm that forges a link between cryptography and modern data summarization techniques known as coresets (core-sets), and sketches in particular. The key idea is to compute only a coreset of the desired report. Since the coreset is small, the client can quickly decode the desired report that the server computes after decrypting the coreset. We implemented our main reporting system in an open source library. This is the first implemented system that can answer such database queries when processing only FHE encrypted data and queries. As our analysis promises, the experimental results show that we can run Secure report queries on billions records in minutes on an Amazon EC2 server, compared to less than a hundred-thousands in previous FHE based solutions.

Biometrics offers higher accuracy for personal recognition as well as provides greater security than traditional methods because of its properties. However, ironically, these properties are also weaknesses because biometric data is permanently linked with an individual and cannot be revoked or cancelled, especially when biometric data is compromised, which can lead to a serious privacy issue. By reviewing current approaches, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is considered as a promising solution for this privacy issue because of its ability to perform computations in the encrypted domain. We studied the effectiveness of FHE when it is used in biometric systems. The main contributions of this paper are the implementation of a privacy-preserving iris biometric authentication protocol adapted to lattice-based FHE and a sound security analysis of authentication and privacy. This work is concluded with some factors to be addressed to enhance privacy as well as some considerations to improve the performance of this implementation.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows computing on encrypted data, enabling secure offloading of computation to untrusted servers. Though it provides ideal security, FHE is prohibitively expensive when executed in software. These overheads are a major barrier to FHE's widespread adoption. We present F1, the first FHE accelerator that is capable of executing full FHE programs. F1 builds on an in-depth architectural analysis of the characteristics of FHE computations that reveals acceleration opportunities. F1 is a wide-vector processor with novel functional units deeply specialized to FHE primitives, such as modular arithmetic, number-theoretic transforms, and structured permutations. This organization provides so much compute throughput that data movement becomes the bottleneck. Thus, F1 is primarily designed to minimize data movement. F1 is the first system to accelerate complete FHE programs, and outperforms state-of-the-art software implementations by gmean 5,400x. These speedups counter FHE's overheads and enable new applications, like real-time private deep learning in the cloud.

SIFT (scale invariant feature transform) is one of the most robust and the widely used image matching algorithms based on local features. It has been used in the aspect of the cameras target matching. For its high complexity, this paper proposes a target matching method for multiple cameras by combining SIFT and the rotation-invariant LBP (local binary patterns). The object detection is obtained by improved Back-ground subtraction technique, and particle filter is used for region-based object tracking. The descriptor combining SIFT and the rotation-invariant LBP is calculated for every object region. The object matching is obtained by comparing the distance of feature matrix. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is more rapid than the standard SIFT algorithm while the performance is favorably compared to the standard SIFT algorithm, and it is robust in various scenes.

Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) demands secure inference on sensitive data in untrusted environments. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables computation directly on encrypted data, but it incurs prohibitive communication and computational overhead on edge devices. Hybrid homomorphic encryption (HHE) mitigates this by combining symmetric encryption with FHE, reducing client-side costs; however, existing implementations remain impractical for resource-constrained deployments. This paper proposes the first end-to-end hardware-accelerated HHE framework, which integrates a lightweight symmetric cipher optimized for FHE compatibility with a dedicated hardware accelerator. Beyond this integration, we introduce a microarchitectural optimization for throughput and energy efficiency. The proposed architecture is validated within a complete PPML pipeline, demonstrating significantly lower latency and power consumption than software implementations. Experimental results on a PYNQ-Z2 platform with MNIST validate our approach, achieving a 50× reduction in client-side encryption latency and a 2× throughput gain over existing FPGA-based HHE accelerators. These improvements enable practical and secure inference on edge devices. Our contributions establish a hardware-software co-design methodology for deploying scalable, secure machine learning in resource-constrained environments, validating the feasibility of low-power HHE for edge deployment.

Statistical confidentiality focuses on protecting data to preserve its analytical value while preventing identity exposure, ensuring privacy and security in any system handling sensitive information. Homomorphic encryption allows computations on encrypted data without revealing it to anyone other than an owner or an authorized collector. When combined with other techniques, homomorphic encryption offers an ideal solution for ensuring statistical confidentiality. TFHE (Fast Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus) is a fully homomorphic encryption scheme that supports efficient homomorphic operations on Booleans and integers. Building on TFHE, Zama’s Concrete project offers an open-source compiler that translates high-level Python code (version 3.9 or higher) into secure homomorphic computations. This study examines the feasibility of the Concrete compiler to perform core statistical analyses on encrypted data. We implement traditional algorithms for core statistical measures including the mean, variance, and five-point summary on encrypted datasets. Additionally, we develop a bitonic sort implementation to support the five-point summary. All implementations are executed within the Concrete framework, leveraging its built-in optimizations. Their performance is systematically evaluated by measuring circuit complexity, programmable bootstrapping count (PBS), compilation time, and execution time. We compare these results to findings from previous studies wherever possible. The results show that the complexity of sorting and statistical computations on encrypted data with the Concrete implementation of TFHE increases rapidly, and the size and range of data that can be accommodated is small for most applications. Nevertheless, this work reinforces the theoretical promise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) for statistical analysis and highlights a clear path forward: the development of optimized, FHE-compatible algorithms.

This article critically examines the increasing reliance on cloud computing for data storage and processing, with a focus on the associated security and privacy challenges, especially when handling sensitive data. It explores homomorphic encryption (HE), particularly fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), as a promising solution for enabling computations on encrypted data without compromising confidentiality. Through a systematic literature review of studies published between 2017 and 2024, the article evaluates various homomorphic encryption algorithms, assessing their effectiveness in encryption and decryption, as well as performance metrics such as execution time, communication overhead, and energy consumption. The findings identify FHE as a widely researched technique, yet highlight significant challenges, including high computational overhead and complexity, which limit its suitability for real-time applications. The article underscores the need for continued research to enhance the efficiency of HE algorithms and calls for collaborative efforts among academia, industry, and regulators to establish robust frameworks for data privacy and security in cloud computing environments.