A framework is provided in which a querying agency can request (via a query entity) encrypted data through a service provider from a data owning agency that stores encrypted data. The framework uses homomorphic encryption. The data may be gallery entities, and each of the elements in the framework operate on doubly-encrypted information. The service provider compares a representation of an encrypted query entity from the querying agency and representations of encrypted gallery entities from the data owning agency, resulting in doubly-encrypted values of a metric between corresponding compared representations. The querying agency gets result(s), based on the metric, which indicate whether it is probable the service provider has data similar to or the same as query data in the query entity. The elements have to perform communication in order for the querying agency or the data owning agency to get cleartext information corresponding to the query entity.