FHERMA Cookbook: FHE Components for Privacy-Preserving Applications

Abstract

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables computation over encrypted data and is considered a fundamental tool for privacy-preserving systems. Despite significant theoretical progress, its practical adoption remains limited. One contributing factor is the absence of reusable, application-level components suitable for integration into real-world systems. This work introduces a library of FHE components developed through a competition-based framework. The components are outcomes of a series of formalized challenges published on the FHERMA platform, each targeting a specific challenge—such as comparison, sorting, or matrix operations—under concrete cryptographic and performance constraints. This initial release includes contributions from independent researchers and reflects a variety of approaches across different FHE schemes. The library is intended to expand over time as new challenges are introduced and solved, forming a foundation for building and evaluating privacy-preserving applications.

@inproceedings{cookbook,
    author = {Adamek, Janis and Aikata, Aikata and Al Badawi, Ahmad and Alexandru, Andreea and Arakelov, Armen and Arakelov, Gurgen and Binfet, Philipp and Correa, Victor and Dumezy, Jules and Gomenyuk, Sergey and Kononova, Valentina and Lekomtsev, Dmitrii and Maloney, Vivian and Nguyen, Chi-Hieu and Polyakov, Yuriy and Pianykh, Daria and Shaul, Hayim and Darup, Moritz Schulze and Teichrib, Dieter and Tronin, Dmitry},
    title = {FHERMA Cookbook: FHE Components for Privacy-Preserving Applications},
    year = {2025},
    isbn = {9798400719004},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3733811.3767313},
    doi = {10.1145/3733811.3767313},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Encrypted Computing \& Applied Homomorphic Computing},
    pages = {68–76},
    numpages = {9},
    keywords = {application, encryption, fhe, homomorphic, library},
    location = {Taipei, Taiwan},
    series = {WAHC '25}
}