PaReNTT: Low-Latency Parallel Residue Number System and NTT-Based Long Polynomial Modular Multiplication for Homomorphic Encryption

High-speed long polynomial multiplication is important for applications in homomorphic encryption (HE) and lattice-based cryptosystems. This paper addresses low-latency hardware architectures for long polynomial modular multiplication using the number-theoretic transform (NTT) and inverse NTT (iNTT). Parallel NTT and iNTT architectures are proposed to reduce the number of clock cycles to process the polynomials. Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) is used to decompose the modulus into multiple smaller moduli. Our proposed architecture, namely PaReNTT, makes three novel contributions. First, cascaded parallel NTT and iNTT architectures are proposed such that any buffer requirement for permuting the product of the NTTs before it is input to the iNTT is eliminated. This is achieved by using different folding sets for the NTTs and iNTT. Second, a novel approach to expand the set of feasible special moduli is presented where the moduli can be expressed in terms of a few signed power-of-two terms. Third, novel architectures for pre-processing for computing residual polynomials using the CRT and post-processing for combining the residual polynomials are proposed. These architectures significantly reduce the area consumption of the pre-processing and post-processing steps. The proposed long modular polynomial multiplications are ideal for applications that require low latency and high sample rate such as in the cloud, as these feed-forward architectures can be pipelined at arbitrary levels. Pipelining and latency tradeoffs are also investigated. Compared to a prior design, the proposed architecture reduces latency by a factor of 49.2, and the area-time products (ATP) for the lookup table and DSP, ATP(LUT) and ATP(DSP), respectively, by 89.2% and 92.5%. Specifically, we show that for
$n=4096$
and a 180-bit coefficient, the proposed 2-parallel architecture requires 6.3 Watts of power while operating at 240 MHz, with 6 moduli, each of length 30 bits, using Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale+ FPGA.