A Standardization Guide for Homomorphic Encryption Applications for Digital Forensic Investigations

摘要

In recent years, cloud computing has emerged as an important paradigm in the computing environment due to its many advantages both to individuals as well as corporates. Some of these advantages include cost efficiencies, increased storage space and many other benefits associated with handing over responsibility to a third party for access to data and information as and when needed. The recent advancement in technology has resulted in the growing need to perform more functions, either than storage, in the cloud whilst maintaining the security and functionality aspect of cloud computing. Homomorphic encryption has been hailed as the holy grail of modern computing, it allows specific types of computations to be carried out on the encrypted data without having to decrypt beforehand as is the case with regular encryption methods. In this case, the client would need to provide the private key to the server for decryption prior to a desired manipulation of data, which might affect the confidentiality and privacy of the stored data. Recent literature highlights the importance of a homomorphic encryption scheme that is able to maintain security and still remain efficient in performing tasks. There are numerous homomorphic cryptosystems that have been proposed but not all have been proven to be practical in specific real-life scenarios. Although there have been few attempts, the lack of standardization has led to many experts in the field merely providing an intuitive approach to the implementation of homomorphic encryption for specified applications as a result attracting some resistance in the information technology industry. Also, this gap has brought about concerns regarding data and information security thus hindering the wide adoption of homomorphic encryption. This paper aims to provide a guide to the implementation of the existing homomorphic encryption schemes across various applications to enable a digital forensic investigation process to follow in order to address the highlighted concerns in a manner that can be measurable and mitigated. A matter analysis of empirical studies available on these applications will be presented.