Paper 2025/711

Fast Plaintext-Ciphertext Matrix Multiplication from Additively Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

Plaintext-ciphertext matrix multiplication (PC-MM) is an indispensable tool in privacy-preserving computations such as secure machine learning and encrypted signal processing. While there are many established algorithms for plaintext-plaintext matrix multiplication, efficiently computing plaintext-ciphertext (and ciphertext-ciphertext) matrix multiplication is an active area of research which has received a lot of attention. Recent literature have explored various techniques for privacy-preserving matrix multiplication using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes with ciphertext packing and Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processing. On the other hand, there hasn't been any attempt to speed up PC-MM using unpacked additively homomorphic encryption (AHE) schemes beyond the schoolbook method and Strassen's algorithm for matrix multiplication. In this work, we propose an efficient PC-MM from unpacked AHE, which applies Cussen's compression-reconstruction algorithm for plaintext-plaintext matrix multiplication in the encrypted setting. We experimentally validate our proposed technique using a concrete instantiation with the additively homomorphic elliptic curve ElGamal encryption scheme and its software implementation on a Raspberry Pi 5 edge computing platform. Our proposed approach achieves up to an order of magnitude speedup compared to state-of-the-art for large matrices with relatively small element bit-widths. Extensive measurement results demonstrate that our fast PC-MM is an excellent candidate for efficient privacy-preserving computation even in resource-constrained environments.