Cost-Effective Optimization and Implementation of the CRT-Paillier Decryption Algorithm for Enhanced Performance

Abstract

To address the privacy protection problem in cloud computing, privacy enhancement techniques such as the Paillier additive homomorphism algorithm are receiving widespread attention. Paillier algorithm allows addition and scalar multiplication operations in dencrypted state, which can effectively protect privacy. However, its computational efficiency is limited by complex modulo operations due to the ciphertext expansion followed by encryption. To accelerate its decryption operation, the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) is often used to optimize these modulo operations, which lengthens the decryption computation chain in turn. To address this issue, we propose an eCRT-Paillier decryption algorithm that shortens the decryption computation chain by combining precomputed parameters and eliminating extra judgment operations introduced by Montgomery modular multiplications. These two improvements reduce 50% modular multiplications and 60% judgment operations in the postprocessing of the CRT-Paillier decryption algorithm. Based on these improvements, we propose a highly parallel full-pipeline architecture to eliminate stalls caused by multiplier reuse in traditional modular exponentiation operations. This architecture also adopts some optimizations such as simplifying modular exponentiation units by dividing the exponent into segments and parallelizing data flow by multi-core instantiation. Finally, a high-throughput and efficient Paillier accelerator named MESA was implemented on the Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA for evaluation, which can complete a decryption using 2048-bit key within 0.577ms under 100 MHz clock frequency. Compared to prior works, MESA demonstrates a throughput improvement of 1.16 to 313.21 under identical conditions, also with enhancements in area efficiency for LUT, DSP, and FF of 3.32 to 117.55, 1.49 to 1.64, and 2.94 to 9.94, respectively.