We present a radically new approach to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that dramatically improves performance and bases security on weaker assumptions. A central conceptual contribution in our work is a new way of constructing leveled fully homomorphic encryption schemes (capable of evaluating arbitrary polynomial-size circuits), without Gentry’s bootstrapping procedure. Specifically, we offer a choice of FHE schemes based on the learning with error (LWE) or ring-LWE (RLWE) problems that have 2λ security against known attacks. For RLWE, we have: • A leveled FHE scheme that can evaluate L-level arithmetic circuits with ˜O(λ · L3 ) per-gate computation – i.e., computation quasi-linear in the security parameter. Security is based on RLWE for an approximation factor exponential in L. This construction does not use the bootstrapping procedure. • A leveled FHE scheme that uses bootstrapping as an optimization, where the per-gate computation (which includes the bootstrapping ...