Efficient FHE from (Standard) LWE

As anounced in the title, Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan (TODO: cite) introduced a fully homomorphic encryption scheme which is based only on the LWE assumption. They show that the security of the scheme can be reduced to the worst-case hardness of short vector problems on arbitrary latices.

They start by introducing a somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme SH, which is then transformed into a bootstrappable scheme BTS. In doing so, the authors deviate from previously known techniques of “squashing” the decryption algorithm of SH that has been used by Dijk, Gentry, Halevi and Vaikuntanathan in FHE over the integers and instead introduce a new “dimension-modulus reduction” technique, which shortens the ciphertexts and simplifies the decryption circuit of SH. This is all achieved without introducing additional assumptions, such as the hardness of the sparse subset-sum problem.

This scheme has particularly short ciphertexts and for this reasons the authors managed to use it for constructing an efficient single-server private information retrieval (PIR) protocol.

A Somewhat Homomorphic encryption Scheme SH

Let us start by presenting a somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme. Denote by Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \lambda} the security parameter. The scheme is parameterized by a dimension Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle n \in \mathbb N} , a positive integer Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle m \in \mathbb N } , an odd modulus Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle q } (which does not have to be prime) and a noise distribution Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \chi } over Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathbb Z_q } . An additional parameter of the scheme Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle L \in \mathbb N } is an upper bound on the maximal multiplicative depth that the scheme can homomorphically evaluate.

We are not going to elaborate on the appropriate choice of the size for the parameters, but we invite the curious reader to look at the paper. However, for brevity, we mention that the dimension Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle n} is polynomial in the security parameter Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \lambda } , Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle m \geq n \log(q) + 2 \lambda } is a polynomial in Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle n } , the modulus is an odd number Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle q \in [ 2^{n^{\epsilon}}, 2 \cdot 2^{n^{\epsilon}}) } is sub-exponential in Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle n } , i.e. Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \epsilon } is a positive constant which is strictly smaller than Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle 1 } . The noise distribution Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \chi } produces small samples, of magnitude at most Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle n } in Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \mathbb Z_{\mathfrak q} } . The depth bound Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle L } is approximately of the size Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle epsilon \cdot \log(n) } .

Bootstrapping BTS into a Fully Homomorphic encryption scheme

Efficiency of the Scheme