Evervault Papers

Crypto means cryptography

The most important cryptography papers spanning the past, present, and future of cryptosystems & cryptology.

Non-Malleable Cryptography

Danny Dolev, Cynthia Dwork, & Moni Naor

On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs

Boaz Barak, Oded Goldreich, Rusell Impagliazzo, Steven Rudich, Amit Sahai, Salil Vadhan, & Ke Yang

Computer Systems Established, Maintained and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups

David L. Chaum

A Digital Signature Based on a Conventional Encryption Function

Ralph C. Merkle

The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems

Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, & Charles Rackoffero

Minimal Key Lengths for Symmetric Ciphers to Provide Adequate Commercial Security

Matt Blaze, Whiteld Diffie, Ronald L. Rivest, Bruce Schneier, Tsutomu Shimomura, Eric Thompson, & Michael Wiener

CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing

Raluca Ada Popa, Catherine M. S. Redfield, Nickolai Zeldovich, & Hari Balakrishnan

Protocols for Secure Computations

Andrew C. Yao

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Satoshi Nakamoto

A fully homomorphic encryption scheme

Craig Gentry

On Data Banks and Privacy Homomorphisms

Ronald L. Rivest, Len Adleman, & Michael L. Dertouzos

On Data Banks and Privacy Homomorphisms

Ronald L. Rivest, Len Adleman, & Michael L. Dertouzos — Published October 1978

In On Data Banks and Privacy Homomorphisms, Rivest, Adleman, and Dertouzos proposed the problems of (1) modifying a hardware computer system to solve the problem of performing operations on encrypted data securely, and (2) the problem of constructing what has come to be known as a fully-homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme.

The RSA public-key cryptosystem is a partially homomorphic encryption scheme, where the multiplication of the ciphertext C is reflected in the plaintext P:

Encrypt P to get C, multiply C by 2, and then decrypt 2C — and you get 2P. That’s a homomorphism: perform some mathematical operation to the ciphertext, and that operation is reflected in the plaintext.” — Bruce Schneier

A FHE cryptosystem is one that is homomorphic under both addition and multiplication and yet still secure. FHE makes it possible to perform arbitrary computations on encrypted data while it remains encrypted — and without needing a secret key. In short, you can process encrypted data without ever decrypting it.

It was not until 2009 when Craig Gentry published a plausible construction of a FHE scheme.

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