Paper 2026/901 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/901 ↗

Threshold (T)FHE without smudging by means of correct threshold additive HE

Abstract

Designing threshold lattice-based FHE schemes remains challenging due to the noise leakage that may occur during distributed decryption. The mainstream approach to avoid this consists of relying on noise flooding or smudging techniques. However, using these techniques comes at the cost of the much larger parameters required to ensure reliable decryption, and they are not easily applicable to schemes with smaller ciphertext moduli such as TFHE. In this paper, we demonstrate that smudging can be avoided for LWE-based FHE schemes, such as TFHE, by using a correct Linear Homomorphic Encryption (LHE) scheme, like Paillier, to encrypt the $b$-term of an LWE pair obtained after completing a homomorphic computation and sanitizing the resulting ciphertext. The key intuition is that, because the b-term of the LWE pair is not revealed to the decrypting parties, noise leakage is no longer an issue (with sanitization ensuring noise/message independence). We then instantiate this approach using TFHE as the baseline LWE scheme as well as the Tiresias threshold variant of Paillier. We prove the resulting construction, denoted thPLWE, is IND-CPA secure under static corruption and adaptive queries (Scor-Adp-IND-CPA) under the assumption that Tiresias achieves the same. We then provide experimental results to assess the practicality of the approach and compare it to other recent works.