GSW - Bootstrapping

Gentry's bootstrapping theorem allows for converting a “somewhat homomorphic” encryption scheme (which supports only a bounded number of homomorphic operations) into a fully homomorphic encryption one (which has no such bound). The bounded nature of all known somewhat homomorphic schemes cannot be avoided due to “error” terms in their ciphertexts, which are necessary for security. The error grows as a result of performing homomorphic operations, and if it grows too large, the ciphertext will no longer decrypt correctly.

Bootstrapping the error of a ciphertext so that it can support more homomorphic operations, by homomorphically evaluating the decryption function on the ciphertext. The result is a ciphertext that still encrypts the original encrypted message. If the error coming from the homomorphic evaluation is smaller than the error in the original ciphertext, we say that the ciphertext is “refreshed”. To date, bootstrapping is the only known way of obtaining an unbounded FHE scheme, i.e., one that can homomorphically evaluate any efficient function using keys and ciphertexts of a fixed size.

Here we present an efficient bootstrapping method for a variant of the GSW scheme, as presented in the paper of Alperin-Sheriff and Peikert .