International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Bootstrapping is a key operation in fully homomorphic encryption schemes that enables the evaluation of arbitrary multiplicative depth circuits. In the BFV scheme, bootstrapping corresponds to reducing the size of accumulated noise in lower bits while preserving the plaintext in the upper bits. The previous instantiation of BFV bootstrapping is achieved through the digit extraction procedure. However, its performance is highly dependent on the plaintext modulus, so only a limited form of the plaintext modulus, a power of a small prime number, was used for the efficiency of bootstrapping.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to instantiate BFV bootstrapping, distinct from the previous digit extraction-based method. The core idea of our bootstrapping is to utilize CKKS bootstrapping as a subroutine, so the performance of our method mainly depends on the underlying CKKS bootstrapping rather than the plaintext modulus.

We implement our method at a proof-of-concept level to provide concrete benchmark results. When performing the bootstrapping operation for a 51-bits plaintext modulus, our method improves the previous digit extraction-based method by a factor of 37.9 in latency and 29.4 in throughput. Additionally, we achieve viable bootstrapping performance for large plaintext moduli, such as 144-bits and 234-bits, which has never been measured before.