The Use of Fully Homomorphic Encryption at Server-Side In Https: A Mini Review

Abstract

With As the need for secure digital communication has been growing, the requirement to safeguard sensitive data during communication is becoming more important, as well as when the data is processed on the server-side. As with HTTPS, Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption provides security for the data while it is being transmitted, but it doesn't prevent the plaintext from being exposed during computation on the server. To overcome this limitation, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows performing computation directly on encrypted data. This review focuses on the integration of FHE with HTTPS-based systems, and particularly on how to relate TLS-based transport security and application-layer encrypted computation. It presents a comparative study of TLS and FHE security guarantees, summarizes key integration strategies and discusses deployment considerations. Special focus is paid to the computational overhead, latency, ciphertext expansion, scalability and resource requirements. The reviewed evidence is analyzed from a decision point of view to detect the compromises of the choice among conventional, FHE-based and hybrid secure-processing architectures. The results show that the decision of whether or not to deploy FHE should not be based only on the confidentiality requirements, but should also consider the computational complexity, the latency constraints, the scalability, the infrastructure capabilities and the application-specific constraints. The review thus serves as a structured foundation for decision support for choosing suitable cryptographic architectures for secure processing on the server side in the context of HTTPS.