## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2022/238

HEAD: an FHE-based Outsourced Computation Protocol with Compact Storage and Efficient Computation

Lijing Zhou and Ziyu Wang and Xiao Zhang and Yu Yu

Abstract: Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) provides a natural solution for privacy-preserving outsourced computation, but a straightforward FHE-based protocol may suffer from high computational overhead and large ciphertext expansion rate, especially for computation-intensive tasks over large data, which are the main obstacles towards practical outsourced computation. In this paper, we present HEAD, a generic outsourced computation protocol that can be based on most mainstream (typically a BGV or GSW style scheme) FHE schemes with more compact storage and less computational costs than the straightforward FHE-based counterpart. In particular, our protocol enjoys a ciphertext/plaintext expansion rate of 1 (i.e., no expansion) at the server side. This is achieved by means of pseudorandomly masked'' ciphertexts, and the efficient transformations of them into FHE ciphertexts to facilitate privacy-preserving computation. Depending on the underlying FHE in use, our HEAD protocol can be instantiated with the three masking techniques, namely modulo-subtraction-masking, modulo-division-masking, and XOR-masking, to support the decimal integer, real, or binary messages. Thanks to these masking techniques, various homomorphic computation tasks are made more efficient and less noise accumulative. We evaluate the performance of our protocol on BFV, BGV, CKKS, and FHEW schemes based on the PALISADE and SEAL libraries, which confirms the theoretical analysis of the reduction computation costs and noise. For example, the computation time in our BFV tests in an x86 server for the sum or product of eight ciphertexts is reduced from 336.3 ms to 6.3 ms, or from 1219.4 ms to 9.5 ms, respectively. Furthermore, our multi-input masking and unmasking operations are more flexible than the FHE SIMD-batching, by supporting an on-demand configuration of FHE during each outsourced computation request.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Fully homomorphic encryption

Date: received 24 Feb 2022, last revised 24 Mar 2022

Contact author: zhoulijing at huawei com, wangziyu13 at huawei com, zhangxiao81 at huawei com, yuyu at cs sjtu edu cn

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/2022/238

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