International Association
for Cryptologic Research

There are two competing approaches to bootstrap the FHEW fully homomorphic encryption scheme (Ducas and Micciancio, Eurocrypt 2015) and its variants: the original AP/FHEW method, which supports arbitrary secret key distributions, and the improved GINX/TFHE method, which uses much smaller evaluation keys, but is directly applicable only to binary secret keys, restricting the scheme's applicability. In this paper, we present a new bootstrapping procedure for FHEW-like encryption schemes that achieves the best features of both methods: support for arbitrary secret key distributions at no additional runtime costs, while using small evaluation keys. (Support for arbitrary secret keys is critical in a number of important applications, like threshold and some multi-key homomorphic encryption schemes.) As an added benefit, our new bootstrapping procedure results in smaller noise growth than both AP and GINX, regardless of the key distribution. Our improvements are both theoretically significant (offering asymptotic savings, up to a $O(log n)$ multiplicative factor, either on the running time or public evaluation key size), and practically relevant. For example, for a concrete 128-bit target security level, we show how to decrease the evaluation key size of the best previously known scheme by more than 30\%, while also slightly reducing the running time. We demonstrate the practicality of the proposed methods by building a prototype implementation within the PALISADE/OpenFHE open-source homomorphic encryption library. We provide optimized parameter sets and implementation results showing that the proposed algorithm has the best performance among all known FHEW bootstrapping methods in terms of runtime and key size. We illustrate the benefits of our method by sketching a simple construction of threshold homomorphic encryption based on FHEW.

Homomorphic encryption enables computation on encrypted data, and hence it has a great potential in privacy-preserving outsourcing of computations to the cloud. Hardware acceleration of homomorphic encryption is crucial as software implementations are very slow. In this paper, we present design methodologies for building a programmable hardware accelerator for speeding up the cloud-side homomorphic evaluations on encrypted data.First, we propose a divide-and-conquer technique that enables homomorphic evaluations in the polynomial ring RQ,2N = ZQ[x]/(x2N + 1) to use a hardware accelerator that has been built for the smaller ring RQ,N = ZQ[x]/(xN + 1). The technique makes it possible to use a single hardware accelerator flexibly for supporting several homomorphic encryption parameter sets.Next, we present several architectural design methods that we use to realize the flexible and instruction-set accelerator architecture, which we call ‘Medha’. At every level of the implementation hierarchy, we explore possibilities for parallel processing. Starting from hardware-friendly parallel algorithms for the basic building blocks, we gradually build heavily parallel RNS polynomial arithmetic units. Next, many of these parallel units are interconnected elegantly so that their interconnections require the minimum number of nets, therefore making the overall architecture placement-friendly on the platform. As homomorphic encryption is computation- as well as data-centric, the speed of homomorphic evaluations depends greatly on the way the data variables are handled. For Medha, we take a memory-conservative design approach and get rid of any off-chip memory access during homomorphic evaluations.Finally, we implement Medha in a Xilinx Alveo U250 FPGA and measure timing performances of the microcoded homomorphic addition, multiplication, key-switching, and rescaling routines for the leveled fully homomorphic encryption scheme RNSHEAAN at 200 MHz clock frequency. For the large parameter sets (log Q,N) = (438, 214) and (546, 215), Medha achieves accelerations by up to 68× and 78× times respectively compared to a highly optimized software implementation Microsoft SEAL running at 2.3 GHz.