When and Where Faults Matter: A Study of Transient Errors in CKKS Multiplication
2026-08-11 • Hardware Architecture
Hardware ArchitectureCryptography and Security
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study a special kind of encryption called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which lets computers do calculations on encrypted data without unlocking it. They focus on understanding where and when errors happen during a key step called homomorphic multiplication in a version named CKKS. Their findings show that these errors in specific parts of the encrypted data really affect how correct the final answer is. This helps improve how reliable encrypted computations can be.
Fully Homomorphic EncryptionCKKS SchemeHomomorphic MultiplicationCiphertextError AnalysisPrivacy-Preserving ComputationEncrypted Data
Authors
Vattana Chan, Matías Mazzanti, Karthik Swaminathan, Augusto Vega, Esteban Mocskos, Radha Venkatagiri
Abstract
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a privacy-preserving encryption paradigm that enables computation directly on encrypted data without requiring decryption. In this paper, we study errors in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) computations, with a particular focus on server-side homomorphic multiplication in the unoptimized CKKS (Cheon--Kim--Kim--Song) scheme. We show that both the timing and the location of errors in the ciphertext components \(c_0\) and \(c_1\) have a significant impact on the correctness of the final FHE output.