Paper 2024/1623

General Functional Bootstrapping using CKKS

Abstract

The Ducas-Micciancio (DM/FHEW) and Chilotti-Gama-Georgieva-Izabachène (CGGI/TFHE) cryptosystems provide a general privacy-preserving computation capability. These fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) cryptosystems can evaluate an arbitrary function expressed as a general look-up table (LUT) via the method of functional bootstrapping (also known as programmable bootstrapping). The main limitation of DM/CGGI functional bootstrapping is its efficiency because this procedure has to bootstrap every encrypted number separately. A different bootstrapping approach, based on the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS) FHE scheme, can achieve much smaller amortized time due to its ability to bootstrap many thousands of numbers at once. However, CKKS does not currently provide a functional bootstrapping capability that can evaluate a general LUT. An open research question is whether such capability can be efficiently constructed. We give a positive answer to this question by proposing and implementing a general functional bootstrapping method based on CKKS-style bootstrapping. We devise a theoretical toolkit for evaluating an arbitrary function using the theory of trigonometric Hermite interpolations, which provides control over noise reduction during functional bootstrapping. Our experimental results for 8-bit LUT evaluation show that the proposed method achieves the amortized time of 0.75 milliseconds, which is three orders of magnitude faster than the DM/CGGI approach and 6.6x faster than (a more restrictive) amortized functional bootstrapping method based on the Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren (BFV) FHE scheme.