Craig Gentry

A fully homomorphic encryption scheme is one that enables arbitrary computations to be performed on encrypted data without the data being decrypted. The construction of such a scheme has been a long-standing open problem in cryptography. It has attracted much interest, both on theoretical grounds and because of potential applications such as searching on encrypted data. Craig Gentry's outstanding work has now solved this problem: it provides the first construction of a fully homomorphic encryption scheme. The construction itself is creative, intriguing, and elegant. Craig Gentry's research should inspire a substantial flow of foundational and applied research in the coming years.