Efficient Arithmetic-and-Comparison Homomorphic Encryption with Space Switching

Abstract

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables computation on encrypted data without decryption, making it central to privacy-preserving applications. However, no existing scheme efficiently supports both arithmetic and comparison operations in a unified framework. Prior approaches such as scheme switching and polynomial approximation face serious limitations: switching incurs prohibitive overhead for large inputs, while approximation methods introduce errors near critical points, restricting use in accuracy-sensitive tasks. We propose space switching method to integrate arithmetic and comparison computation seamlessly within FV-style schemes. Our approach identifies that the two types of operations require different plaintext spaces and introduces two procedures: a reduction step to transition from the number space $\mathbb{Z}_{p^r}$ to the digit space $\mathbb{Z}_{p}$, and a modulus-raising step to map results back to $\mathbb{Z}_{p^r}$. This design enables continuous evaluation of arithmetic and comparison within the same scheme. Experiments show that our method achieves up to $17\times$ faster performance than scheme switching and $15\times$ faster than direct comparison on database workloads, demonstrating its practicality for real-world privacy-preserving computation. Code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/UCF-Lou-Lab-PET/Universal-BGV.