During the last few years homomorphic encryption techniques have been studied extensively since they have become more and more important in many different cryptographic protocols such as voting protocols, lottery protocols, anonymity, privacy, and electronic auctions. This paper critically summarizes the current state-of-art of homomorphic cryptosystems. It recalls the basic ideas, discusses their parameters, performances and security issues. And, finally we present their capabilities in the future applications. Attention: Based on the investigations by the J.UCS office, this article needs to be retracted due to plagiarism issue. The paper was found to duplicate word by word without proper citation significant parts of the content from Fontaine, C., Galand, F. (2007). A survey of homomorphic encryption for nonspecialists. Journal of Information Security, 1, 41-50. Retrieved from http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/is/2007/013801.pdf As a consequence, this conference paper has been formally retracted, and the relevant parties informed about this step. The J.UCS office apologizes to the authors of the plagiarized article. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that the paper is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to the authors of the original article and readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process. August 4, 2014.