International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Bootstrapping is a critical technique in constructing fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which serves to refresh the noise in FHE ciphertexts, enabling an arbitrary number of homomorphic operations. Among published results, the TFHE-rs library [Zam22] offers the fastest bootstrapping implementation on CPU platforms by taking advantage of AVX-512 instructions.In this paper, we improve the efficiency of the bootstrapping algorithm based on the NTRU problem. First, we introduce the approximate gadget decomposition method tailored for NTRU ciphertext, reducing the number of NTT operations required for external products. Second, by integrating the approximate decomposition and key unrolling techniques, we improve the performance of CMux-based blind rotation. Third, for the automorphism-based blind rotation method, we present a hybrid window size technique that reduces the number of automorphisms by 34% compared to recent work [XZD+23](in Crypto23).Subsequently, we implement the proposed bootstrapping algorithm on the CPU platform with AVX instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method only takes 3.8ms, which achieves a 1.8× speedup compared to the TFHE-rs library. Finally, we propose an efficient FPGA accelerator based on the CMux method, which not only achieves the best performance but also exhibits high throughput advantages. Our accelerator can improve performance by 2x compared to state-of-the-art FPGA implementations (e.g., FPT).

FHEW-like schemes utilize exact gadget decomposition to reduce error growth and ensure that the bootstrapping incurs only polynomial error growth. However, the exact gadget decomposition method requires higher computation complexity and larger memory storage. In this paper, we improve the efficiency of the FHEWlike schemes by utilizing the composite NTT that performs the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) with a composite modulus. Specifically, based on the composite NTT, we integrate modulus raising and gadget decomposition in the external product, which reduces the number of NTTs required in the blind rotation from 2(dg + 1)n to 2(⌈dg⌉/2 + 1)n. Furthermore, we develop a modulus packing technique that uses the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) and composite NTT to bootstrap multiple LWE ciphertexts through one blind rotation process.We implement the bootstrapping algorithms and evaluate the performance on various benchmark computations using both binary and ternary secret keys. Our results of the single bootstrapping process indicate that the proposed approach achieves speedups of up to 1.7 x, and reduces the size of the blind rotation key by 50% under specific parameters. Finally, we instantiate two ciphertexts in the packing procedure, and the experimental results show that our technique is around 1.5 x faster than the two bootstrapping processes under the 127-bit security level.