Energy Savings in Privacy-Preserving Computation Offloading with Protection by Homomorphic Encryption

This paper investigates energy savings on mobile systems in privacy-preserving computation offloading. Offloading computation-intensive programs to servers can save energy but data must be protected for privacy concerns. The protection schemes must guarantee operations performed on the protected data remain meaningful and the results are still acceptable. The protection cannot require excessive amounts of energy overhead. We propose to adopt homomorphic encryption to protect data in image retrieval before sending data to servers. We implement our method on a PDA and evaluates the retrieval performance and energy savings.