Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/565
Packed Ciphertexts in LWE-based Homomorphic Encryption
Zvika Brakerski and Craig Gentry and Shai Halevi
Abstract: In this short note we observe that the Peikert-Vaikuntanathan-Waters (PVW) method of packing many plaintext elements in a single Regev-type ciphertext, can be used for performing SIMD homomorphic operations on packed ciphertext. This provides an alternative to the Smart-Vercauteren (SV) ciphertext-packing technique that relies on polynomial-CRT. While the SV technique is only applicable to schemes that rely on ring-LWE (or other hardness assumptions in ideal lattices), the PVW method can be used also for cryptosystems whose security is based on standard LWE (or more broadly on the hardness of ``General-LWE'').
Although using the PVW method with LWE-based schemes leads to worse asymptotic efficiency than using the SV technique with ring-LWE schemes, the simplicity of this method may still offer some practical advantages. Also, the two techniques can be used in tandem with ``general-LWE'' schemes, suggesting yet another tradeoff that can be optimized for different settings.
Category / Keywords: public-key cryptography / Homomorphic Encryption, LWE, Packed Ciphertexts
Date: received 3 Oct 2012
Contact author: shaih at alum mit edu
Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation
Version: 20121007:202143 (All versions of this report)
Short URL: ia.cr/2012/565
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