Paper 2023/1949

HELIOPOLIS: Verifiable Computation over Homomorphically Encrypted Data from Interactive Oracle Proofs is Practical

Abstract

Homomorphic encryption (HE) enables computation on encrypted data, which in turn facilitates the outsourcing of computation on private data. However, HE offers no guarantee that the returned result was honestly computed by the cloud. In order to have such guarantee, it is necessary to add verifiable computation (VC) into the system. The most efficient recent works in VC over HE focus on verifying operations on the ciphertext space of the HE scheme, which usually lacks the algebraic structure that would make it compatible with existing VC systems. For example, multiplication of ciphertexts in the current most efficient HE schemes requires non-algebraic operations such as real division and rounding. Therefore, existing works for VC over HE have to either give up on those efficient HE schemes, or incur a large overhead (an amount of constraints proportional to the ciphertext ring's size) in order to emulate these non-algebraic operations. In this work, we move away from that paradigm by placing the verification checks in the plaintext space of HE, all while the prover remains computing on ciphertexts. We achieve this by introducing a general transformation for Interactive Oracle Proofs (IOPs) to work over HE, whose result we denote as HE-IOPs. We apply this same transformation to the FRI [Ben-Sasson et al., ICALP 2018] IOP of proximity and we show how to compile HE-Reed Solomon-encoded IOPs and HE-$\delta$-correlated-IOPs with HE-FRI into HE-IOPs. Furthermore, our construction is compatible with a prover that provides input in zero-knowledge, and only relies on building blocks that are plausibly quantum-safe. Aligning the security parameters of HE and FRI is a difficult task for which we introduce several optimizations. We demonstrate their efficiency with a proof-of-concept implementation and show that we can run FRI's commit phase for 4096 encrypted Reed Solomon codewords with degree bound $2^{11}$ in just 5.4 seconds (using 32 threads) on a c6i.metal instance using less than 4GB of memory. Verification takes just 12.3 milliseconds (single-threaded) for the same parameter set and can be reduced to just 5.6ms with parameters optimized for the verifier.

Note: Improved implementation. Source code available at https://github.com/antoniocgj/HELIOPOLIS