On ideal lattices and learning with errors over rings

  • Authors:
  • Vadim Lyubashevsky;Chris Peikert;Oded Regev

  • Affiliations:
  • Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel;School of Computer Science, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology;Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

  • Venue:
  • EUROCRYPT'10 Proceedings of the 29th Annual international conference on Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The “learning with errors” (LWE) problem is to distinguish random linear equations, which have been perturbed by a small amount of noise, from truly uniform ones. The problem has been shown to be as hard as worst-case lattice problems, and in recent years it has served as the foundation for a plethora of cryptographic applications. Unfortunately, these applications are rather inefficient due to an inherent quadratic overhead in the use of LWE. A main open question was whether LWE and its applications could be made truly efficient by exploiting extra algebraic structure, as was done for lattice-based hash functions (and related primitives). We resolve this question in the affirmative by introducing an algebraic variant of LWE called ring-LWE, and proving that it too enjoys very strong hardness guarantees. Specifically, we show that the ring-LWE distribution is pseudorandom, assuming that worst-case problems on ideal lattices are hard for polynomial-time quantum algorithms. Applications include the first truly practical lattice-based public-key cryptosystem with an efficient security reduction; moreover, many of the other applications of LWE can be made much more efficient through the use of ring-LWE. Finally, the algebraic structure of ring-LWE might lead to new cryptographic applications previously not known to be based on LWE.