Homomorphic Encryption in Manufacturing Compliance Checks.

Compliance data consists of manufacturing quality measures collected in the production process. Quality checks are most of the times computationally expensive to perform mainly due to the amount of collected data. Having trusted solutions for outsourcing analyses to the Cloud is an opportunity for reducing costs of operation. However, the adoption of the Cloud computation paradigm is delayed for the many security risks associated with it. In the use case we consider in this paper, compliance data is very sensitive, because it may contain IP-critical information, or it may be related to safety-critical operations or products. While the technological solutions that protect data in-transit or at rest has reached a satisfying level of maturity, there is a huge demand for securing data in-use. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is one of the main technological enablers for secure computation outsourcing. In the last decade, HE has reached maturity with remarkable pace. However, using HE is still far from being an automated process and each use case introduces different challenges. In this paper, we investigate application of HE to the described scenario highlighting, in particular, the main operations of the comparison algorithm, we identify the challenges that HE technology introduces and we propose a solution per challenge. Finally, we evaluate our proposals using one of the open source HE libraries, SEAL, for our implementations.