The Paillier cryptosystem, named after and invented by Pascal Paillier in 1999, is a probabilistic asymmetric algorithm for public key cryptography. The problem of computing n-th residue classes is believed to be computationally difficult. The decisional composite residuosity assumption is the intractability hypothesis upon which this cryptosystem is based.
The scheme is an additive homomorphic cryptosystem; this means that, given only the public-key and the encryption of and, one can compute the encryption of .