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Abstract
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) enables secure computation on encrypted data
without decryption, allowing a great opportunity for privacy-preserving
computation. In particular, domains such as healthcare, finance, and
government, where data privacy and security are of utmost importance, can
benefit from HE by enabling third-party computation and services on sensitive
data. In other words, HE constitutes the "Holy Grail" of cryptography: data
remains encrypted all the time, being protected while in use.
HE's security guarantees rely on noise added to data to make relatively
simple problems computationally intractable. This error-centric intrinsic HE
mechanism generates new challenges related to the fault tolerance and
robustness of HE itself: hardware- and software-induced errors during HE
operation can easily evade traditional error detection and correction
mechanisms, resulting in silent data corruption (SDC).
In this work, we motivate a thorough discussion regarding the sensitivity of
HE applications to bit faults and provide a detailed error characterization
study of CKKS (Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song). This is one of the most popular HE schemes
due to its fixed-point arithmetic support for AI and machine learning
applications. We also delve into the impact of the residue number system (RNS)
and the number theoretic transform (NTT), two widely adopted HE optimization
techniques, on CKKS' error sensitivity. To the best of our knowledge, this is
the first work that looks into the robustness and error sensitivity of
homomorphic encryption and, as such, it can pave the way for critical future
work in this area.