Communications in Cryptology IACR CiC


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Call for papers: IACR Communications in Cryptology Submit a paper Communications in Cryptology is a journal for original research papers which welcomes submissions on any topic in cryptology. This covers all research topics in cryptography and cryptanalysis, including but not limited to foundational theory and mathematics the design, proposal, and analysis of cryptographic primitives a...
Jeongeun Park, Barry van Leeuwen, Oliver Zajonc
Published 2024-10-07 PDFPDF

Multi-key fully homomorphic encryption (MKFHE), a generalization of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), enables a computation over encrypted data under multiple keys. The first MKFHE schemes were based on the NTRU primitive, however these early NTRU based FHE schemes were found to be insecure due to the problem of over-stretched parameters. Recently, in the case of standard (non-multi key) FHE a secure version, called FINAL, of NTRU has been found. In this work we extend FINAL to an MKFHE scheme, this allows us to benefit from some of the performance advantages provided by NTRU based primitives. Thus, our scheme provides competitive performance against current state-of-the-art multi-key TFHE, in particular reducing the computational complexity from quadratic to linear in the number of keys.

Robin Geelen
Published 2024-10-07 PDFPDF

Numerous applications in homomorphic encryption require an operation that moves the slots of a ciphertext to the coefficients of a different ciphertext. For the BGV and BFV schemes, the only efficient algorithms to implement this slot-to-coefficient transformation were proposed in the setting of non-power-of-two cyclotomic rings. In this paper, we devise an FFT-like method to decompose the slot-to-coefficient transformation (and its inverse) for power-of-two cyclotomic rings. The proposed method can handle both fully and sparsely packed slots. Our algorithm brings down the computational complexity of the slot-to-coefficient transformation from a linear to a logarithmic number of FHE operations, which is shown via a detailed complexity analysis.

The new procedures are implemented in Microsoft SEAL for BFV. The experiments report a speedup of up to 44 times when packing 2^12 elements from GF(8191^8). We also study a fully packed bootstrapping operation that refreshes 2^15 elements from GF(65537) and obtain an amortized speedup of 12 times.

Ruixiao Li, Hayato Yamana
Published 2024-10-07 PDFPDF

To address security issues in cloud computing, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables a third party to evaluate functions using ciphertexts that do not leak information to the cloud server. The remaining problems of FHE include high computational costs and limited arithmetic operations, only evaluating additions and multiplications. Arbitrary functions can be evaluated using a precomputed lookup table (LUT), which is one of the solutions for those problems. Previous studies proposed LUT-enabled computation methods 1) with bit-wise FHE and 2) with word-wise FHE. The performance of LUT-enabled computation with bit-wise FHE drops quickly when evaluating BigNum functions because of the complexity being O(s·2^d·m), where m represents the number of inputs, d and s represent the bit lengths of the inputs and outputs, respectively. Thus, LUT-enabled computation with word-wise FHE, which handles a set of bits with one operation, has also been proposed; however, previous studies are limited in evaluating multivariate functions within two inputs and cannot speed up the evaluation when the domain size of the integer exceeds 2N, where N is the number of elements packed into a single ciphertext. In this study, we propose a non-interactive model, in which no decryption is required, to evaluate arbitrary multivariate functions using homomorphic table lookup with word-wise FHE. The proposed LUT-enabled computation method 1) decreases the complexity to O(2^d·m/l), where l is the element size of FHE packing; 2) extends the input and output domain sizes to evaluate multivariate functions over two inputs; and 3) adopts a multidimensional table for enabling multithreading to reduce latency. The experimental results demonstrate that evaluating a 10-bit two-input function and a 5-bit three-input function takes approximately 90.5 and 105.5 s with 16-thread, respectively. Our proposed method achieves 3.2x and 23.1x speedup to evaluate two-bit and three-bit 3-input functions compared with naive LUT-enabled computation with bit-wise FHE.

Anis Bkakria, Malika Izabachène
Published 2024-07-08 PDFPDF

Pattern matching methods are essential in various applications where users must disclose highly sensitive information. Among these applications are genomic data analysis, financial records inspection, and intrusion detection processes, all of which necessitate robust privacy protection mechanisms. Balancing the imperative of protecting the confidentiality of analyzed data with the need for efficient pattern matching presents a significant challenge.

In this paper, we propose an efficient post-quantum secure construction that enables arbitrary pattern matching over encrypted data while ensuring the confidentiality of the data to be analyzed. In addition, we address scenarios where a malicious data sender, intended to send an encrypted content for pattern detection analysis, has the ability to modify the encrypted content. We adapt the data fragmentation technique to handle such a malicious sender. Our construction makes use of a well-suited Homomorphic Encryption packing method in the context of fragmented streams and combines homomorphic operations in a leveled mode (i.e. without bootstrapping) to obtain a very efficient pattern matching detection process.

In contrast to the most efficient state-of-the-art scheme, our construction achieves a significant reduction in the time required for encryption, decryption, and pattern matching on encrypted data. Specifically, our approach decreases the time by factors of $1850$, $10^6$, and $245$, respectively, for matching a single pattern, and by factors of $115$, $10^5$, and $12$, respectively, for matching $2^{10}$ patterns.

Sean Murphy, Rachel Player
Published 2024-07-08 PDFPDF

This paper develops Central Limit arguments for analysing the noise in ciphertexts in two homomorphic encryption schemes that are based on Ring-LWE. The first main contribution of this paper is to present and evaluate an average-case noise analysis for the BGV scheme. Our approach relies on the recent work of Costache et al.(SAC 2023) that gives the approximation of a polynomial product as a multivariate Normal distribution. We show how this result can be applied in the BGV context and evaluate its efficacy. We find this average-case approach can much more closely model the noise growth in BGV implementations than prior approaches, but in some cases it can also underestimate the practical noise growth. Our second main contribution is to develop a Central Limit framework to analyse the noise growth in the homomorphic Ring-LWE cryptosystem of Lyubashevsky, Peikert and Regev (Eurocrypt 2013, full version). Our approach is very general: apart from finite variance, no assumption on the distribution of the noise is required (in particular, the noise need not be subgaussian). We show that our approach leads to tighter bounds for the probability of decryption failure than those of prior work.

Pierrick Méaux, Jeongeun Park, Hilder V. L. Pereira
Published 2024-04-09 PDFPDF

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a powerful tool to achieve non-interactive privacy preserving protocols with optimal computation/communication complexity. However, the main disadvantage is that the actual communication cost (bandwidth) is high due to the large size of FHE ciphertexts. As a solution, a technique called transciphering (also known as Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption) was introduced to achieve almost optimal bandwidth for such protocols. However, all existing works require clients to fix a precision for the messages or a mathematical structure for the message space beforehand. It results in unwanted constraints on the plaintext size or underlying structure of FHE based applications.

In this article, we introduce a new approach for transciphering which does not require fixed message precision decided by the client, for the first time. In more detail, a client uses any kind of FHE-friendly symmetric cipher for $\{0,1\}$ to send its input data encrypted bit-by-bit, then the server can choose a precision $p$ depending on the application and homomorphically transforms the encrypted bits into FHE ciphertexts encrypting integers in $\mathbb{Z}_p$. To illustrate our new technique, we evaluate a transciphering using FiLIP cipher and adapt the most practical homomorphic evaluation technique [CCS'22] to keep the practical latency. As a result, our proof-of-concept implementation for $p$ from $2^2$ to $2^8$ takes only from $13$ ms to $137$ ms.

Shahla Atapoor, Karim Baghery, Hilder V. L. Pereira, Jannik Spiessens
Published 2024-04-09 PDFPDF

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a prevalent cryptographic primitive that allows for computation on encrypted data. In various cryptographic protocols, this enables outsourcing computation to a third party while retaining the privacy of the inputs to the computation. However, these schemes make an honest-but-curious assumption about the adversary. Previous work has tried to remove this assumption by combining FHE with Verifiable Computation (VC). Recent work has increased the flexibility of this approach by introducing integrity checks for homomorphic computations over rings. However, efficient FHE for circuits of large multiplicative depth also requires non-ring computations called maintenance operations, i.e. modswitching and keyswitching, which cannot be efficiently verified by existing constructions. We propose the first efficiently verifiable FHE scheme that allows for arbitrary depth homomorphic circuits by utilizing the double-CRT representation in which FHE schemes are typically computed, and using lattice-based SNARKs to prove components of this computation separately, including the maintenance operations. Therefore, our construction can theoretically handle bootstrapping operations. We also present the first implementation of a verifiable computation on encrypted data for a computation that contains multiple ciphertext-ciphertext multiplications. Concretely, we verify the homomorphic computation of an approximate neural network containing three layers and >100 ciphertexts in less than 1 second while maintaining reasonable prover costs.