Notes from the latest HomomorphicEncryption.org standards meeting

[Homomorphic Encryption]

Hi Everyone:

We had an excellent HomomorphicEncryption.org standards meeting in Santa Clara.  Many many thanks to Caz and Intel for being such gracious hosts.  It was an excellent community event with deep and thoughtful discussion.

To report out from the steering committee notes, there was focused discussions concerning:

• Schemes (Kim, Yuriy, Mariya) presented a path forward for specifying schemes and ensuring interoperability.  We decided to have 4 working groups to write draft specifications for the main 4 schemes: BFV, BGV, CKKS, and TFHE.  This will be a separate new section of the HE Standard.  Numerous people volunteered for these groups.  We will aim to get a list of the members of these 4 working groups up on the website, establish a communication forum for these 4 groups to coordinate to ensure uniformity of document styles and scope, and provide a target schedule for completion.
• Security (Kristin, Rachel, Ben, Yuriy, Daniele)   Rachel and Ben presented the hybrid and hybrid dual attack models and gave an overview of the security risks of using sparse secrets.  A robust discussion led to the following conclusions: we will add more rows to the tables, to allow for lattice dimension larger than 32K, and several other small concrete improvements will be addressed, such as removing extra columns for irrelevant attacks, and adding in hybrid and hybrid-dual attack models.
• Applications (Kurt, Juan)  Juan presented the first draft standard RFC for a medical protocol using HE, based on the Medco project in Switzerland at EPFL.   Flavio (IBM) and Peter (IXUP) volunteered to write a similar RFC for other protocols in applications that they work on.
• Governance (Yaron)  Yaron presented a formal governance proposal.  In response, the current organizational structure of HomomorphicEncryption.org will be clarified to the whole community and we will increase transparency of the entire process.  We aim to facilitate governance discussion on a dedicated mailing list.  IPR issues are much harder to address and likely no decision could be made without the advice of a lawyer.
• Reach-out (Ro and Bastiaan) presented models of engagement with international standards groups, notably ITU, IETF, IEEE and ISO, with the various tradeoffs.  Ro offered to put together a plan on next steps and Bastiaan offered to facilitate engagement with the ITU.

There were several groups who proposed to host upcoming HE Standards meetings:

• Jung Hee Cheon, Jihoon Cho, (Seoul National University and Samsung) offered to host and sponsor a workshop next year in Seoul, with tutorials on HE beforehand.  It is expected that it would reach a very large contingent of interested parties in Asia.
• Dimitar Jetchev, Nicolas Gama, Mariya (Inpher)  and Juan (EPFL) offered to host in Lausanne, possibly co-located and coordinated with the UN-ITU Workshop on AI for Good on May 4-8.  Could be the day before Eurocrypt.
• Yaron (Intuit) and Kurt and Yuriy (Duality) offered to host in Tel Aviv, coordinated with Tel Aviv cyberweek in June.

Please note: We will shorty be soliciting governance discussion on our governance mailing list.  We'll be sending an email reminder for the location of this list, and will welcome open governance discussion starting a week from now after everyone has had time to subscribe to the list who wants to.