FHE circuit privacy almost for free

Abstract

Circuit privacy is an important property for many applications of fully homomorphic encryption. Prior approaches for achieving circuit privacy rely on superpolynomial noise flooding or on bootstrapping. In this work, we present a conceptually different approach to circuit privacy based on a novel characterization of the noise growth amidst homomorphic evaluation. In particular, we show that a variant of the GSW FHE for branching programs already achieves circuit privacy; this immediately yields a circuit-private FHE for NC1circuits under the standard LWE assumption with polynomial modulus-to-noise ratio. Our analysis relies on a variant of the discrete Gaussian leftover hash lemma which states that etG−1(v)+small noise does not depend on v. We believe that this result is of independent interest.