Improved Cryptanalysis of a Fully Homomorphic Symmetric Encryption Scheme

Homomorphic encryption is widely used in the scenarios of big data and cloud computing for supporting calculations on ciphertexts without leaking plaintexts. Recently, Li et al. designed a symmetric homomorphic encryption scheme for outsourced databases. Wang et al. proposed a successful key-recovery attack on the homomorphic encryption scheme but required the adversary to know some plaintext/ciphertext pairs. In this paper, we propose a new ciphertext-only attack on the symmetric fully homomorphic encryption scheme. Our attack improves the previous Wang et al.’s attack by eliminating the assumption of known plaintext/ciphertext pairs. We show that the secret key of the user can be recovered by running lattice reduction algorithms twice. Experiments show that the attack successfully and efficiently recovers the secret key of the randomly generated instances with an overwhelming probability.