In recent years, Semantic Communication (SemCom), which aims to achieve efficient and reliable transmission of meaning between agents, has garnered significant attention from both academia and industry. To ensure the security of communication systems, encryption techniques are employed to safeguard confidentiality and integrity. However, existing encryption schemes encounter obstacles when applied to SemCom. To address this issue, this paper explores the feasibility of applying homomorphic encryption (HE) to SemCom. Initially, we review the encryption algorithms utilized in mobile communication systems and analyze the challenges associated with their application to SemCom. Subsequently, we overview HE techniques and employ scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) to demonstrate that the extractable semantic information can be preserved in homomorphic encrypted ciphertext. Based on this finding, we further propose the HE-joint source-channel coding (HE-JSCC) scheme, where the traditional JSCC model architecture is modified to support HE operations. Moreover, we present the simulation results for image classification and image generation tasks. Furthermore, we provide potential future research directions for homomorphic encrypted SemCom.

翻译：近年来，旨在实现智能体间意义高效可靠传输的语义通信（SemCom）已引起学术界和工业界的广泛关注。为确保通信系统的安全性，加密技术被用于保障通信的机密性与完整性。然而，现有加密方案在应用于语义通信时面临诸多障碍。为解决这一问题，本文探讨了将同态加密（HE）应用于语义通信的可行性。首先，我们回顾了移动通信系统中采用的加密算法，并分析了将其应用于语义通信所面临的挑战。随后，我们概述了同态加密技术，并利用尺度不变特征变换（SIFT）证明了可提取的语义信息能够在同态加密的密文中得以保留。基于这一发现，我们进一步提出了同态加密联合信源信道编码（HE-JSCC）方案，该方案通过修改传统JSCC模型架构以支持同态加密运算。此外，我们展示了图像分类与图像生成任务的仿真结果。最后，我们为同态加密语义通信提出了若干潜在的未来研究方向。