Tulva: Practical Asynchronous Threshold FHE

arXiv:2610.20521 · cs.CR · Submitted 2026-10-14 · Read on arXiv

cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-10-14

Updated: 2026-10-14

Comments: Full version of the paper accepted at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2027. 63 pages

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We present Tulva, a practical threshold FHE scheme which equips a base FHE scheme with an asynchronous threshold decryption mechanism in a modular way.

Abstract

We present Tulva, a practical threshold FHE scheme which equips a base FHE scheme with an asynchronous threshold decryption mechanism in a modular way. Our scheme simultaneously (1) is compatible with virtually any base FHE scheme and leaves its ciphertexts unchanged apart from an appended random tag, (2) supports a wide range of threshold profiles (t,K) and ring degrees at least 256 with 6-25 bits partial decryption per plaintext bit, and (3) achieves security in the presence of partial decryption queries on challenge ciphertexts based on the standard LWE assumption. We provide an open-source implementation, benchmark its threshold decryption performance and evaluate the end-to-end costs for typical privacy-preserving Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) use cases. For 16-out-of-512 threshold and a publicly preprocessed ciphertext, computing secret-dependent partial decryption and public share combination requires only 3.7 ms and 0.5 ms, respectively, on commodity hardware. Compared with the state-of-the-art synchronous scheme [Zyskind et al., CCS'25], we replace their ciphertext-independent yet interactive preparation of secret-correlated randomness with a public, ciphertext-dependent 0.5 s preprocessing step, eliminate interaction in the online phase while maintaining similar decryption time on the same machine, and support 32 times more total users.

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