Homomorphic AES Evaluation using NTRU

Since its introduction more than a decade ago the homomorphic properties of the NTRU encryption scheme have gone largely ignored. A variant of NTRU proposed by Stehlé and Steinfeld was recently extended into a full fledged multi-key fully homomorphic encryption scheme by Alt-López, Tromer and Vaikuntanathan (ATV). This NTRU based FHE presents a viable alternative to the currently dominant BGV style FHE schemes. While the scheme appears to be more efficient, a full implementation and comparison to BGV style implementations has been missing in the literature. In this work, we develop a customized implementation of the ATV scheme. First parameters are selected to yield an efficient and yet secure ATV instantiation. We present an analysis of the noise growth that allows us to formulate a modulus cutting strategy for arbitrary circuits. Furthermore, we introduce a specialization of the ring structure that allows us to drastically reduce the public key size making evaluation of deep circuits such as the AES block cipher viable on a standard computer with a reasonable amount of memory. Moreover, with the modulus specialization the need for key switching is eliminated. Finally, we present a generic bit-sliced implementation of the ATV scheme that embodies a number of optimizations. To assess the performance of the scheme we homomorphically evaluate the full 10 round AES circuit in 31 hours with 2048 message slots resulting in 55 sec per AES block evaluation time.