An Efficient Secret Key Homomorphic Encryption Used in Image Processing Service

• Published in: Security and communication networks 2017-01, Vol.2017 (2017), p.1-11
• Main Authors: Tian, Feng, An, Jian, Gui, Xiaolin, Yang, Pan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cloud computing; Data encryption; Digital imaging; Encryption; Image processing; Privacy
• ISSN: 1939-0114; 1939-0122
• DOI: 10.1155/2017/7695751

Homomorphic encryption can protect user’s privacy when operating on user’s data in cloud computing. But it is not practical for wide using as the data and services types in cloud computing are diverse. Among these data types, digital image is an important personal data for users. There are also many image processing services in cloud computing. To protect user’s privacy in these services, this paper proposed a scheme using homomorphic encryption in image processing. Firstly, a secret key homomorphic encryption (IGHE) was constructed for encrypting image. IGHE can operate on encrypted floating numbers efficiently to adapt to the image processing service. Then, by translating the traditional image processing methods into the operations on encrypted pixels, the encrypted image can be processed homomorphically. That is, service can process the encrypted image directly, and the result after decryption is the same as processing the plain image. To illustrate our scheme, three common image processing instances were given in this paper. The experiments show that our scheme is secure, correct, and efficient enough to be used in practical image processing applications.