Our construction improves on previous works in two aspects:
1. We show that ``somewhat homomorphic'' encryption can be based on LWE, using a new {\em re-linearization} technique. In contrast, all previous schemes relied on complexity assumptions related to ideals in various rings.
2. We deviate from the ``squashing paradigm'' used in all previous works. We introduce a new {\em dimension-modulus reduction} technique, which shortens the ciphertexts and reduces the decryption complexity of our scheme, {\em without introducing additional assumptions}.
Our scheme has very short ciphertexts and we therefore use it to construct an asymptotically efficient LWE-based single-server private information retrieval (PIR) protocol. The communication complexity of our protocol (in the public-key model) is $k \cdot \polylog(k)+\log |DB|$ bits per single-bit query (here, $k$ is a security parameter).
Category / Keywords: public-key cryptography / fully homomorphic encryption, learning with errors Date: received 26 Jun 2011, last revised 4 Aug 2011 Contact author: vinodv at alum mit edu Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation Version: 20110804:160806 (All versions of this report) Short URL: ia.cr/2011/344