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Abstract
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) enables computation on encrypted data without
decryption, making it a cornerstone of privacy-preserving computation in
untrusted environments. As HE sees growing adoption in sensitive applications
such as secure machine learning and confidential data analysis ensuring its
robustness against errors becomes critical. Faults (e.g., transmission errors,
hardware malfunctions, or synchronization failures) can corrupt encrypted data
and compromise the integrity of HE operations. However, the impact of soft
errors (such as bit flips) on modern HE schemes remains unexplored.
Specifically, the CKKS scheme-one of the most widely used HE schemes for
approximate arithmetic-lacks a systematic study of how such errors propagate
across its pipeline, particularly under optimizations like the Residue Number
System (RNS) and Number Theoretic Transform (NTT). This work bridges that gap
by presenting a theoretical and empirical analysis of CKKS's fault tolerance
under single bit-flip errors. We focus on client-side operations (encoding,
encryption, decryption, and decoding) and demonstrate that while the vanilla
CKKS scheme exhibits some resilience, performance optimizations (RNS/NTT)
introduce significant fragility, amplifying error sensitivity. By
characterizing these failure modes, we lay the groundwork for error-resilient
HE designs, ensuring both performance and integrity in privacy-critical
applications.