Experimental demonstration of quantum fully homomorphic encryption with application in a two-party secure protocol

Abstract

A fully homomorphic encryption system hides data from unauthorized parties, while still allowing them to perform computations on the encrypted data. Aside from the straightforward benefit of allowing users to delegate computations to a more powerful server without revealing their inputs, a fully homomorphic cryptosystem can be used as a building block in the construction of a number of cryptographic functionalities. Designing such a scheme remained an open problem until 2009, decades after the idea was first conceived, and the past few years have seen the generalization of this functionality to the world of quantum machines. Quantum schemes prior to the one implemented here were able to replicate some features in particular use-cases often associated with homomorphic encryption but lacked other crucial properties, for example, relying on continual interaction to perform a computation or leaking information about the encrypted data. We present the first experimental realisation of a quantum fully homomorphic encryption scheme. We further present a toy two-party secure computation task enabled by our scheme. Finally, as part of our implementation, we also demonstrate a post-selective two-qubit linear optical controlled-phase gate with a much higher post-selection success probability (1/2) when compared to alternate implementations, e.g. with post-selective controlled-Z or controlled-X gates (1/9).</p