Paper 2024/109

Simpler and Faster BFV Bootstrapping for Arbitrary Plaintext Modulus from CKKS

Abstract

Bootstrapping is currently the only known method for constructing fully homomorphic encryptions. In the BFV scheme specifically, bootstrapping aims to reduce the error of a ciphertext while preserving the encrypted plaintext. The existing BFV bootstrapping methods follow the same pipeline, relying on the evaluation of a digit extraction polynomial to annihilate the error located in the least significant digits. However, due to its strong dependence on performance, bootstrapping could only utilize a limited form of plaintext modulus, such as a power of a small prime number. In this paper, we present a novel approach to instantiate BFV bootstrapping, distinct from the previous digit extraction-based method. The core idea of our bootstrapping is to utilize CKKS bootstrapping as a subroutine, so the performance of our method mainly depends on the underlying CKKS bootstrapping rather than the plaintext modulus. We implement our method at a proof-of-concept level to provide concrete benchmark results. When performing the bootstrapping operation for a 51-bits plaintext modulus, our method improves the previous digit extraction-based method by a factor of 37.9 in latency and 29.4 in throughput. Additionally, we achieve viable bootstrapping performance for large plaintext moduli, such as 144-bits and 234-bits, which has never been measured before.