Abstract-Homomorphic encryption (HE) systems enable computations on encrypted data, without decrypting and without knowledge of the secret key. In this work, we describe an optimized Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) based implementation of a variant of the HE system recently proposed by Gentry, Sahai and Waters (GSW). Although this system was widely believed to be less efficient than its contemporaries, we demonstrate quite the opposite behavior for a large class of applications. We first highlight and carefully exploit the algebraic features of the system to achieve significant speedup over the state-of-the-art HE implementation, namely the IBM homomorphic encryption library (HElib). We introduce several optimizations on top of our HE implementation, and use the resulting scheme to construct a homomorphic Bayesian spam filter, secure multiple keyword search, and a homomorphic evaluator for binary decision trees. Our results show a factor of 10× improvement in performance (under the same security settings and CPU platforms) compared to IBM HElib for these applications. Our system is built to be easily portable to GPUs (unlike IBM HElib) which results in an additional speedup of up to a factor of 103.5× to offer an overall speedup of 1035×.
Sharing the medical records of individuals among healthcare providers and researchers around the world can accelerate advances in medical research. While the idea seems increasingly practical due to cloud data services, maintaining patient privacy is of paramount importance. Standard encryption algorithms help protect sensitive data from outside attackers but they cannot be used to compute on this sensitive data while being encrypted. Homomorphic Encryption presents a very useful tool that can compute on encrypted data without the need to decrypt it. In this paper, we describe an optimized NTRU-based implementation of the GSW homomorphic encryption scheme. Our results show a factor of 58 × improvement in CPU performance compared to other recent work on encrypted medical data under the same security settings. Our system is built to be easily portable to GPUs resulting in an additional speedup of up to a factor of 104 × (and 410 ×) to offer an overall speedup of 6085 × (and 24011 ×) using a single GPU (or four GPUs), respectively.
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