Refereed International Conference Publications

HALO: Loop-aware Bootstrapping Management for Fully Homomorphic Encryption [abstract] (ACM)
Seonyoung Cheon, Yongwoo Lee, Hoyun Youm, Dongkwan Kim, Sungwoo Yun, Kunmo Jeong, Dongyoon Lee, and Hanjun Kim
Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems 2025 (ASPLOS), April 2025.
Accept Rate: 12% (65/510).

Thanks to the computation ability on encrypted data, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an attractive solution for privacy-preserving computation. Despite its advantages, FHE suffers from limited applicability in small programs because repeated FHE multiplications deplete the level of a ciphertext, which is finite. Bootstrapping reinitializes the level, thus allowing support for larger programs. However, its high computational overhead and the risk of level underflow require sophisticated bootstrapping placement, thereby increasing the programming burden. Although a recently proposed compiler automatizes the bootstrapping placement, its applicability is still limited due to lack of loop support. This work proposes the first loop-aware bootstrapping management compiler, called HALO, which optimizes bootstrapping placement in an FHE program with a loop. To correctly support bootstrapping-enabled loops, HALO matches encryption types and levels between live-in and loop-carried ciphertexts in the loops. To reduce the bootstrapping overheads, HALO decreases the number of bootstrapping within a loop body by packing the loop-carried variables to a single ciphertext, reduces wasted levels in a short loop body by unrolling the loop, and optimizes the bootstrapping latency by adjusting the target level of bootstrapping as needed. For seven machine learning programs with flat and nested loops, HALO shows 27% performance speedup compared to the state-of-the-art compiler that places bootstrapping operations on fully unrolled loops. In addition, HALO reduces the compilation time and code size by geometric means of 209.12x and 11.0x compared to the compiler, respectively.