Optimizing relinearization in circuits for homomorphic encryption

Abstract: Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows an untrusted party to evaluate arithmetic cir- cuits, i.e., perform additions and multiplications on encrypted data, without having the decryp- tion key. One of the most efficient class of FHE schemes include BGV and FV schemes, which are based on the hardness of the RLWE problem. They share some common features: ciphertext sizes grow after each homomorphic multiplication; multiplication is much more costly than addition, and the cost of homomorphic multiplication scales linearly with the input ciphertext sizes. Furthermore, there is a special relinearization operation that reduce the size of a ciphertext, and the cost of relinearization is on the same order of magnitude as homomorpic multiplication. This motivates us to define a discrete optimization problem, which is to decide where (and how much) in a given circuit to relinearize, in order to minimize the total computational cost. In this paper, we formally define the relinearize problem. We prove that the problem is NP-hard. In addition, in the special case where each vertex has at most one outgoing edge, we give a polynomial-time algorithm.