Michael Walter

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables one to implement low-round and low-communication complexity Multi-Party Computation (MPC) which is secure in the static malicious corruption model. By expanding on an idea presented in the full version of the FHE-based MPC protocol of Smart (IMA, 2023), we show how to completely remove the need for Zero-Knowledge Proofs-of-Knowledge in that protocol. This simplification makes the final security proof of the MPC protocol much simpler, and more modular. The new protocol makes use of an FHE scheme with an encrypted PRF functionality, and in addition to our main result we formalize the security of such encrypted PRFs and prove the construction of Deo et al. (CCS 2025) secure in this model.

We examine the relationship between correctness definitions for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and the associated security definitions. We show that reactive notions of correctness imply IND-CPA-D and sIND-CPA-D security. But that to obtain both IND-CPA-D and sIND-CPA-D security we need to use a randomized version of the evaluation procedure. Such randomized evaluation procedures cause problems in real life deployments of FHE solutions, so we then go on to show how one can de-randomize the evaluation procedure and still obtain sIND-CPA-D security in the random oracle model for the specific FHE scheme of TFHE.

We show that the randomized TFHE bootstrapping technique of Bourse and Izabechène provides a form of sanitization which is error-simulatable. This means that the randomized bootstrap can be used not only for sanitization of ciphertexts (i.e. to hide the function that has been computed), but that it can also be used in server-assisted threshold decryption. Thus we extend the server-assisted threshold decryption method of Passelègue and Stehlé (ASIACRYPT '24) to FHE schemes which have small ciphertext modulus (such as TFHE). In addition the error-simulatable sanitization enables us to obtain FuncCPA security for TFHE essentially for free.

We outline a secure and efficient methodology to do threshold distributed decryption for LWE based Fully Homomorphic Encryption schemes. Due to the smaller parameters used in some FHE schemes, such as Torus-FHE (TFHE), the standard technique of "noise flooding'' seems not to apply. We show that noise flooding can also be used with schemes with such small parameters, by utilizing a switch to a scheme with slightly higher parameters and then utilizing the efficient bootstrapping operations which TFHE offers. Our protocol is proved secure via a simulation argument, making its integration in bigger protocols easier to manage.