On the Weakness of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract: Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows anyone to perform computations on encrypted data, despite not having the secret decryption key. Since the Gentry's work in 2009, the primitive has interested many researchers. In this paper, we stress that any computations performed on encrypted data are constrained to the encrypted domain (finite fields or rings). This restriction makes the primitive useless for most computations involving common arithmetic expressions and relational expressions. It is only applicable to the computations related to modular arithmetic. We want to reaffirm that cryptography uses modular arithmetic a lot in order to obscure and dissipate the redundancies in a plaintext message, not to perform any numerical calculations. We think it might be an overstated claim that FHE is of great importance to client-server computing or cloud computing.