Structural Lattice Reduction: Generalized Worst-Case to Average-Case Reductions and Homomorphic Cryptosystems

In lattice cryptography, worst-case to average-case reductions rely on two problems: Ajtai’s SIS and Regev’s LWE, which both refer to a very small class of random lattices related to the group \(G=\mathbb {Z}_q^n\). We generalize worst-case to average-case reductions to all integer lattices of sufficiently large determinant, by allowing G to be any (sufficiently large) finite abelian group. Our main tool is a novel generalization of lattice reduction, which we call structural lattice reduction: given a finite abelian group G and a lattice L, it finds a short basis of some lattice \(\bar{L}\) such that \(L \subseteq \bar{L}\) and \(\bar{L}/L \simeq G\). Our group generalizations of SIS and LWE allow us to abstract lattice cryptography, yet preserve worst-case assumptions: as an illustration, we provide a somewhat conceptually simpler generalization of the Alperin-Sheriff-Peikert variant of the Gentry-Sahai-Waters homomorphic scheme. We introduce homomorphic mux gates, which allows us to homomorphically evaluate any boolean function with a noise overhead proportional to the square root of its number of variables, and bootstrap the full scheme using only a linear noise overhead.