Paper 2025/720 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/720 ↗

Towards Lightweight CKKS: On Client Cost Efficiency

Abstract

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables clients with small devices to securely delegate their computations to powerful servers. However, to delegate these computations, a client should generate and transmit several gigabytes of FHE keys to the server. Reducing the size of FHE keys without compromising efficiency is therefore highly desirable, particularly for applications involving mobile and IoT devices. In this work, we propose two new key management systems, $\textsf{KG}^{+}$ and $\textsf{BTS}^{+}$, which reduce the client-side cost of FHE. The $\textsf{KG}^{+}$ system significantly reduces the key size without any compromise in the efficiency of homomorphic computation compared to the state-of-the-art key management system by Lee-Lee-Kim-No [Asiacrypt 2023]. The $\textsf{BTS}^{+}$ system further reduces the key size at the expense of granularity in homomorphic computation. Our systems rely on a new ring switching technique for keys that bridges FHE keys with different parameters. This technique decouples the rings of FHE keys during transmission and computation. In our approach, the client generates and sends ``transmission keys'' with size-optimal parameters, and the server generates ``evaluation keys'' with computation-optimal parameters. We evaluate the communication costs of $\textsf{KG}^{+}$ and $\textsf{BTS}^{+}$ on the tasks studied in Lee-Lee-Kim-No. The transmission key sizes for CKKS bootstrapping with ring dimension $2^{16}$ are $325$--$609$ MB for $\textsf{KG}^{+}$ and $285$ MB for $\textsf{BTS}^{+}$. These are $3.09$--$4.37\times$ and $3.51$--$9.30\times$ smaller than Lee-Lee-Kim-No, respectively. For the secure ResNet-20 inference, the key sizes for $\textsf{KG}^{+}$ and $\textsf{BTS}^{+}$ are $325$--$609$ MB and $285$ MB, respectively. These are $3.95$--$5.73\times$ and $4.53$--$12.25\times$ smaller than Lee-Lee-Kim-No.