When and Where Faults Matter: A Study of Transient Errors in CKKS Multiplication

Vattana Chan; Matías Mazzanti; Karthik Swaminathan; Augusto Vega; Esteban Mocskos; Radha Venkatagiri

When and Where Faults Matter: A Study of Transient Errors in CKKS Multiplication

Hardware Architecture 2026-08-11 v1 Cryptography and Security

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.

Keywords

homomorphic encryption CKKS scheme transient errors homomorphic multiplication fault tolerance

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.11147,
  title  = {When and Where Faults Matter: A Study of Transient Errors in CKKS Multiplication},
  author = {Vattana Chan and Matías Mazzanti and Karthik Swaminathan and Augusto Vega and Esteban Mocskos and Radha Venkatagiri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.11147},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

3 pages, 2 figures