Paper 2026/1267 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/1267 ↗

Efficient Private Set Intersection and Searchable Encryption using Homomorphic Bloom Filters

Abstract

Existing encrypted search and private set intersection (PSI) protocols struggle to reconcile post-quantum security with practical efficiency, often leaking search and access patterns or requiring prohibitively deep fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) circuits. We address these limitations by introducing a new Homomorphic Bloom Filters (HBF) framework, a quantum-resilient framework that embeds length-$m$ Bloom filters directly into the plaintext space of an RLWE-based FHE scheme, enabling shallow homomorphic evaluation and matching without structural leakage. Building on HBF, we construct a searchable encryption (SE) scheme and a private set intersection (PSI) protocol, both based on a depth-1 homomorphic missing-bit circuit. The SE scheme requires no rotations or bootstrapping at server side and incurs no additional computational cost as the number of query keywords increases. The PSI protocol reduces each packed Bloom-filter comparison to a single ciphertext--plaintext multiplication, with cost depending on the Bloom-filter length rather than direct element-wise comparisons with the responder's set. This framework confines leakage to benign dataset dimensions, tunable false-positive rates, and other public metadata, thereby eliminating explicit pattern leakage.