The development of homomorphic cryptography; from RSA to Gentry's privacy homomorphism

Abstract

Ever since the discovery of public-key cryptography the necessity for total privacy of digital data has become stronger and stronger, especially since the internet has become an indispensable part of both our private and work lives. Naturally, the question for more and more secure encryption schemes arose in the past few decades. One way to achieve confientiality in applications, such as online banking, electronic voting, virtual networks etc. are homomorphic and especially fully homomorphic cryptographic schemes.<br />In 2009 the long search for the first fully homomorphic enrcyption scheme has come to an end. This was a major step towards secure computing even with the vast development of quantum computers in mind.