International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS) fully homomorphic encryption scheme is designed to efficiently perform computations on real numbers in an encrypted state. Recently, Drucker et al [J. Cryptol.] proposed an efficient strategy to use CKKS in a black-box manner to perform computations on binary data. In this work, we introduce several CKKS bootstrapping algorithms designed specifically for ciphertexts encoding binary data. Crucially, the new CKKS bootstrapping algorithms enable to bootstrap ciphertexts containing the binary data in the most significant bits. First, this allows to decrease the moduli used in bootstrapping, saving a larger share of the modulus budget for non-bootstrapping operations. In particular, we obtain full-slot bootstrapping in ring degree 2^14 for the first time. Second, the ciphertext format is compatible with the one used in the DM/CGGI fully homomorphic encryption schemes. Interestingly, we may combine our CKKS bootstrapping algorithms for bits with the fast ring packing technique from Bae et al [CRYPTO'23]. This leads to a new bootstrapping algorithm for DM/CGGI that outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches when the number of bootstraps to be performed simultaneously is in the low hundreds.

Homomorphically multiplying a plaintext matrix with a ciphertext matrix (PC-MM) is a central task for the private evaluation of transformers, commonly used for large language models. We provide several RLWE-based algorithms for PC-MM that consist of multiplications of plaintext matrices (PC-MM) and comparatively cheap pre-processing and post-processing steps: for small and large dimensions compared to the RLWE ring degree, and with and without precomputation. For the algorithms with precomputation, we show how to perform a \pcmm with a single floating-point PC-MM of the same dimensions. This is particularly meaningful for practical purposes as a floating-point PC-MM can be implemented using high-performance BLAS libraries. The algorithms rely on the multi-secret variant of RLWE, which allows to represent multiple ciphertexts more compactly. We give algorithms to convert from usual shared-secret RLWE ciphertexts to multi-secret ciphertexts and back. Further, we show that this format is compatible with homomorphic addition, plaintext-ciphertext multiplication, and key-switching. This in turn allows us to accelerate the slots-to-coeffs and coeffs-to-slots steps of CKKS bootstrapping when several ciphertexts are bootstrapped at once. Combining batch-bootstrapping with efficient PC-MM results in MaMBo (Matrix Multiplication Bootstrapping), a bootstrapping algorithm that can perform a PC-MM for a limited overhead.

We present HAETAE (Hyperball bimodAl modulE rejecTion signAture schemE), a new lattice-based signature scheme. Like the NIST-selected Dilithium signature scheme, HAETAE is based on the Fiat-Shamir with Aborts paradigm, but our design choices target an improved complexity/compactness compromise that is highly relevant for many space-limited application scenarios. We primarily focus on reducing signature and verification key sizes so that signatures fit into one TCP or UDP datagram while preserving a high level of security against a variety of attacks. As a result, our scheme has signature and verification key sizes up to 39% and 25% smaller, respectively, compared than Dilithium. We provide a portable, constanttime reference implementation together with an optimized implementation using AVX2 instructions and an implementation with reduced stack size for the Cortex-M4. Moreover, we describe how to efficiently protect HAETAE against implementation attacks such as side-channel analysis, making it an attractive candidate for use in IoT and other embedded systems.

Most of the current fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes are based on either the learning-with-errors (LWE) problem or on its ring variant (RLWE) for storing plaintexts. During the homomorphic computation of FHE schemes, RLWE formats provide high throughput when considering several messages, and LWE formats provide a low latency when there are only a few messages. Efficient conversion can bridge the advantages of each format. However, converting LWE formats into RLWE format, which is called \textit{ring packing}, has been a challenging problem. We propose an efficient solution for ring packing for FHE. The main improvement of this work is twofold. First, we accelerate the existing ring packing methods by using bootstrapping and ring switching techniques, achieving practical runtimes. Second, we propose a new method for efficient ring packing, \textsc{HERMES}, by using ciphertexts in Module-LWE (MLWE) formats, to also reduce the memory. To this end, we generalize the tools of LWE and RLWE formats for MLWE formats. On a single-thread implementation, \textsc{HERMES} consumes $10.2$s for the ring packing of $2^{15}$ LWE-format ciphertexts into an RLWE-format ciphertext. This gives $41$x higher throughput compared to the state-of-the-art ring packing for FHE, \textsc{PEGASUS} [S\&P'21], which takes $51.7$s for packing $2^{12}$ LWE ciphertexts with similar homomorphic capacity. We also illustrate the efficiency of \textsc{HERMES} by using it for transciphering from LWE symmetric encryption to CKKS fully homomorphic encryption, significantly outperforming the recent proposals \textsc{HERA} [Asiacrypt'21] and \textsc{Rubato} [Eurocrypt'22].

We formally define polynomial packing methods and initiate a unified study of related concepts in various contexts of cryptography. This includes homomorphic encryption (HE) packing and reverse multiplication-friendly embedding (RMFE) in information-theoretically secure multi-party computation (MPC). We prove several upper bounds and impossibility results on packing methods for $\mathbb{Z}_{p^k}$ or $\mathbb{F}_{p^k}$-messages into $\mathbb{Z}_{p^t}[x]/f(x)$ in terms of (i) packing density, (ii) level-consistency, and (iii) surjectivity. These results have implications on recent development of HE-based MPC over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ secure against actively corrupted majority and provide new proofs for upper bounds on RMFE.

A weak pseudorandom function (weak PRF) is one of the most important cryptographic primitives for its efficiency although it has lower security than a standard PRF. Recently, Boneh et al. (TCC'18) introduced two types of new weak PRF candidates, which are called a basic Mod-2/Mod-3 and alternative Mod-2/Mod-3 weak PRF. Both use the mixture of linear computations defined on different small moduli to satisfy conceptual simplicity, low complexity (depth-2 ${\sf ACC^0}$) and MPC friendliness. In fact, the new candidates are conjectured to be exponentially secure against any adversary that allows exponentially many samples, and a basic Mod-2/Mod-3 weak PRF is the only candidate that satisfies all features above. However, none of the direct attacks which focus on basic and alternative Mod-2/Mod-3 weak PRFs use their own structures. In this paper, we investigate weak PRFs from two perspectives; attacks, fixes. We first propose direct attacks for an alternative Mod-2/Mod-3 weak PRF and a basic Mod-2/Mod-3 weak PRF when a circulant matrix is used as a secret key. For an alternative Mod-2/Mod-3 weak PRF, we prove that the adversary's advantage is at least $2^{-0.105n}$, where $n$ is the size of the input space of the weak PRF. Similarly, we show that the advantage of our heuristic attack to the weak PRF with a circulant matrix key is larger than $2^{-0.21n}$, which is contrary to the previous expectation that `structured secret key' does not affect the security of a weak PRF. Thus, for an optimistic parameter choice $n = 2\lambda$ for the security parameter $\lambda$, parameters should be increased to preserve $\lambda$-bit security when an adversary obtains exponentially many samples. Next, we suggest a simple method for repairing two weak PRFs affected by our attack while preserving the parameters.

We propose a multi-party computation (MPC) protocol over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ secure against actively corrupted majority from somewhat homomorphic encryption. The main technical contributions are: (i) a new efficient packing method for $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$-messages in lattice-based somewhat homomorphic encryption schemes, (ii) a simpler reshare protocol for level-dependent packings, (iii) a more efficient zero-knowledge proof of plaintext knowledge on cyclotomic rings $\Z[X]/\Phi_M(X)$ with $M$ being a prime. Integrating them, our protocol shows from 2.2x upto 4.8x improvements in amortized communication costs compared to the previous best results. Our techniques not only improve the efficiency of MPC over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ considerably, but also provide a toolkit that can be leveraged when designing other cryptographic primitives over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$.

Fully Homomorphic encryption (FHE) has been gaining in popularity as an emerging means of enabling an unlimited number of operations in an encrypted message without decryption. A major drawback of FHE is its high computational cost. Specifically, a bootstrapping step that refreshes the noise accumulated through consequent FHE operations on the ciphertext can even take minutes of time. This significantly limits the practical use of FHE in numerous real applications.By exploiting the massive parallelism available in FHE, we demonstrate the first instance of the implementation of a GPU for bootstrapping CKKS, one of the most promising FHE schemes supporting the arithmetic of approximate numbers. Through analyzing CKKS operations, we discover that the major performance bottleneck is their high main-memory bandwidth requirement, which is exacerbated by leveraging existing optimizations targeted to reduce the required computation. These observations motivate us to utilize memory-centric optimizations such as kernel fusion and reordering primary functions extensively.Our GPU implementation shows a 7.02× speedup for a single CKKS multiplication compared to the state-of-the-art GPU implementation and an amortized bootstrapping time of 0.423us per bit, which corresponds to a speedup of 257× over a single-threaded CPU implementation. By applying this to logistic regression model training, we achieved a 40.0× speedup compared to the previous 8-thread CPU implementation with the same data.

Comparison of two numbers is one of the most frequently used operations, but it has been a challenging task to efficiently compute the comparison function in homomorphic encryption~(HE) which basically support addition and multiplication. Recently, Cheon et al.~(Asiacrypt~2019) introduced a new approximate representation of the comparison function with a rational function, and showed that this rational function can be evaluated by an iterative algorithm. Due to this iterative feature, their method achieves a logarithmic computational complexity compared to previous polynomial approximation methods; however, the computational complexity is still not optimal, and the algorithm is quite slow for large-bit inputs in HE implementation. In this work, we propose new comparison methods with \emph{optimal} asymptotic complexity based on \emph{composite polynomial} approximation. The main idea is to systematically design a constant-degree polynomial $f$ by identifying the \emph{core properties} to make a composite polynomial $f\circ f \circ \cdots \circ f$ get close to the sign function (equivalent to the comparison function) as the number of compositions increases. We additionally introduce an acceleration method applying a mixed polynomial composition $f\circ \cdots \circ f\circ g \circ \cdots \circ g$ for some other polynomial $g$ with different properties instead of $f\circ f \circ \cdots \circ f$. Utilizing the devised polynomials $f$ and $g$, our new comparison algorithms only require $\Theta(\log(1/\epsilon)) + \Theta(\log\alpha)$ computational complexity to obtain an approximate comparison result of $a,b\in[0,1]$ satisfying $|a-b|\ge \epsilon$ within $2^{-\alpha}$ error. The asymptotic optimality results in substantial performance enhancement: our comparison algorithm on $16$-bit encrypted integers for $\alpha = 16$ takes $1.22$ milliseconds in amortized running time based on an approximate HE scheme HEAAN, which is $18$ times faster than the previous work.

In this paper, we describe a polynomial time cryptanalysis of the (approximate) multilinear map proposed by Coron, Lepoint, and Tibouchi in Crypto13 (CLT13). This scheme includes a zero-testing functionality that determines whether the message of a given encoding is zero or not. This functionality is useful for designing several of its applications, but it leaks unexpected values, such as linear combinations of the secret elements. By collecting the outputs of the zero-testing algorithm, we construct a matrix containing the hidden information as eigenvalues, and then recover all the secret elements of the CLT13 scheme via diagonalization of the matrix. In addition, we provide polynomial time algorithms to directly break the security assumptions of many applications based on the CLT13 scheme. These algorithms include solving subgroup membership, decision linear, and graded external Diffie–Hellman problems. These algorithms mainly rely on the computation of the determinants of the matrices and their greatest common divisor, instead of performing their diagonalization.

We present a new cryptanalytic algorithm on obfuscations based on GGH15 multilinear map. Our algorithm, statistical zeroizing attack, directly distinguishes two distributions from obfuscation while it follows the zeroizing attack paradigm, that is, it uses evaluations of zeros of obfuscated programs.Our attack breaks the recent indistinguishability obfuscation candidate suggested by Chen et al. (CRYPTO’18) for the optimal parameter settings. More precisely, we show that there are two functionally equivalent branching programs whose CVW obfuscations can be efficiently distinguished by computing the sample variance of evaluations.This statistical attack gives a new perspective on the security of the indistinguishability obfuscations: we should consider the shape of the distributions of evaluation of obfuscation to ensure security.In other words, while most of the previous (weak) security proofs have been studied with respect to algebraic attack model or ideal model, our attack shows that this algebraic security is not enough to achieve indistinguishability obfuscation. In particular, we show that the obfuscation scheme suggested by Bartusek et al. (TCC’18) does not achieve the desired security in a certain parameter regime, in which their algebraic security proof still holds.The correctness of statistical zeroizing attacks holds under a mild assumption on the preimage sampling algorithm with a lattice trapdoor. We experimentally verify this assumption for implemented obfuscation by Halevi et al. (ACM CCS’17).

We propose a new method to compare numbers which are encrypted by Homomorphic Encryption (HE). Previously, comparison and min/max functions were evaluated using Boolean functions where input numbers are encrypted bit-wise. However, the bit-wise encryption methods require relatively expensive computations for basic arithmetic operations such as addition and multiplication.In this paper, we introduce iterative algorithms that approximately compute the min/max and comparison operations of several numbers which are encrypted word-wise. From the concrete error analyses, we show that our min/max and comparison algorithms have $$\varTheta (\alpha )$$ and $$\varTheta (\alpha \log \alpha )$$ computational complexity to obtain approximate values within an error rate $$2^{-\alpha }$$, while the previous minimax polynomial approximation method requires the exponential complexity $$\varTheta (2^{\alpha /2})$$ and $$\varTheta (\sqrt{\alpha }\cdot 2^{\alpha /2})$$, respectively. Our algorithms achieve (quasi-)optimality in terms of asymptotic computational complexity among polynomial approximations for min/max and comparison operations. The comparison algorithm is extended to several applications such as computing the top-k elements and counting numbers over the threshold in encrypted state.Our method enables word-wise HEs to enjoy comparable performance in practice with bit-wise HEs for comparison operations while showing much better performance on polynomial operations. Computing an approximate maximum value of any two $$\ell $$-bit integers encrypted by HEAAN, up to error $$2^{\ell -10}$$, takes only 1.14 ms in amortized running time, which is comparable to the result based on bit-wise HEs.

In this paper, we propose cryptanalyses of all existing indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) candidates based on branching programs (BP) over GGH13 multilinear map for all recommended parameter settings. To achieve this, we introduce two novel techniques, program converting using NTRU-solver and matrix zeroizing, which can be applied to a wide range of obfuscation constructions and BPs compared to previous attacks. We then prove that, for the suggested parameters, the existing general-purpose BP obfuscations over GGH13 do not have the desired security. Especially, the first candidate indistinguishability obfuscation with input-unpartitionable branching programs (FOCS 2013) and the recent BP obfuscation (TCC 2016) are not secure against our attack when they use the GGH13 with recommended parameters. Previously, there has been no known polynomial time attack for these cases.Our attack shows that the lattice dimension of GGH13 must be set much larger than previous thought in order to maintain security. More precisely, the underlying lattice dimension of GGH13 should be set to $$n=\tilde{\varTheta }( \kappa ^2 \lambda )$$n=Θ~(κ2λ) to rule out attacks from the subfield algorithm for NTRU where $$\kappa $$κ is the multilinearity level and $$\lambda $$λ the security parameter.