Stream Ciphers: A Practical Solution for Efficient Homomorphic-Ciphertext Compression

In typical applications of homomorphic encryption, the first step consists for Alice of encrypting some plaintext m under Bob’s public key \(\mathsf {pk}\) and of sending the ciphertext \(c = \mathsf {HE}_{\mathsf {pk}}(m)\) to some third-party evaluator Charlie. This paper specifically considers that first step, i.e., the problem of transmitting c as efficiently as possible from Alice to Charlie. As others suggested before, a form of compression is achieved using hybrid encryption. Given a symmetric encryption scheme \(\mathsf {E}\), Alice picks a random key k and sends a much smaller ciphertext \(c' = (\mathsf {HE}_{\mathsf {pk}}(k), \mathsf {E}_k(m))\) that Charlie decompresses homomorphically into the original c using a decryption circuit \(\mathcal {C}_{{\mathsf {E}^{-1}}}\). In this paper, we revisit that paradigm in light of its concrete implementation constraints, in particular \(\mathsf {E}\) is chosen to be an additive IV-based stream cipher. We investigate the performances offered in this context by Trivium, which belongs to the eSTREAM portfolio, and we also propose a variant with 128-bit security: Kreyvium. We show that Trivium, whose security has been firmly established for over a decade, and the new variant Kreyvium has excellent performance. We also describe a second construction, based on exponentiation in binary fields, which is impractical but sets the lowest depth record to \(8\) for \(128\)-bit security.