Toward Practical Homomorphic Evaluation of Block Ciphers Using Prince

We present the homomorphic evaluation of the Prince block cipher. Our leveled implementation is based on a generalization of NTRU. We are motivated by the drastic bandwidth savings that may be achieved by scheme conversion. To unlock this advantage we turn to lightweight ciphers such as Prince. These ciphers were designed from scratch to yield fast and compact implementations on resource-constrained embedded platforms. We show that some of these ciphers have the potential to enable near practical homomorphic evaluation of block ciphers. Indeed, our analysis shows that Prince can be implemented using only a 24 level deep circuit. Using an NTRU based implementation we achieve an evaluation time of 3.3 seconds per Prince block – one and two orders of magnitude improvement over homomorphic AES implementations achieved using NTRU, and BGV-style homomorphic encryption libraries, respectively.