Efficient Ranking, Order Statistics, and Sorting under CKKS

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables operations on encrypted data, making it extremely useful for privacy-preserving applications, especially in cloud computing environments. In such contexts, operations like ranking, order statistics, and sorting are fundamental functionalities often required for database queries or as building blocks of larger protocols. However, the high computational overhead and limited native operations of FHE pose significant challenges for an efficient implementation of these tasks. These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that all these functionalities are based on comparing elements, which is a severely expensive operation under encryption.

Previous solutions have typically based their designs on swap-based techniques, where two elements are conditionally swapped based on the results of their comparison. These methods aim to reduce the primary computational bottleneck: the comparison depth, which is the number of non-parallelizable homomorphic comparisons in the algorithm. The current state of the art solutions for sorting by Lu et al. (IEEE S&P '21) and Hong et al. (IEEE TIFS 2021), for instance, achieve a comparison depth of log^2 N and k logk^2N, respectively.

In this paper, we address the challenge of reducing the comparison depth by shifting away from the swap-based paradigm. We present solutions for ranking, order statistics, and sorting, that achieve a comparison depth of up to 2 (constant), making our approach highly parallelizable and suitable for hardware acceleration. Leveraging the SIMD capabilities of the CKKS FHE scheme, our approach re-encodes the input vector under encryption to allow for simultaneous comparisons of all elements with each other. The homomorphic re-encoding incurs a minimal computational overhead of O(log N) rotations. Experimental results show that our approach ranks a 128-element vector in approximately 5.76s, computes its argmin/argmax in 12.83s, and sorts it in 78.64s.