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Background of the question: I’m working on constructing a cryptosystem to achieve a specific goal that could utilize partially homomorphic schemes. (details of the cryptosystem are out of the scope of this post)

Are there any production-grade usages of any partially homomorphic scheme (ElGamal, Paillier, etc) that might be informative in terms of the application side of the scheme?

One example I know is Monero, which uses Pedersen commitments to hide the transaction amount.

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  1. CryptDB was using Pailler cryptosystem to support aggregate queries over encrypted data ( like the summation of data)

  2. Biometric Authentication system can use Goldwasser–Micali that supports x-or of the ciphertexts.

  3. There is a wide range of homomorphic signature schemes.

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Many electronic voting schemes use partially homomorphic encryption schemes. A very simple system is Belenios https://www.belenios.org/, it uses ElGamal and relies on the homomorphic property to tally votes (when message is on the exponent). This system has been used many times in practice, see page 20 of https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02066930/document

Another scheme is Helios https://vote.heliosvoting.org/ which is probably used more in practice than Belenios. It also uses homomorphic encryption.

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    $\begingroup$ "In Belenios (as in Helios), a voter may prove for whom she voted". That opens to vote selling, or vote under duress. $\endgroup$
    – fgrieu ♦
    Commented Aug 29, 2022 at 17:15
  • $\begingroup$ @fgrieu at least prevent calculated voting. I've seen this from a professor... Also, they shared a graph in EuroCrypt 2008 and that indicated a strange result; one would collaborate with X or Y to their paper appear in the conferences, and those names are not one of the well-known researchers... $\endgroup$
    – kelalaka
    Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 13:39

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