Improved Bernoulli Sampling for Discrete Gaussian Distributions over the Integers

Discrete Gaussian sampling is one of the fundamental mathematical tools for lattice-based cryptography. In this paper, we revisit the Bernoulli(-type) sampling for centered discrete Gaussian distributions over the integers, which was proposed by Ducas et al. in 2013. Combining the idea of Karney's algorithm for sampling from the Bernoulli distribution B-e-1/2, we present an improved Bernoulli sampling algorithm. It does not require the use of floating-point arithmetic to generate a precomputed table, as the original Bernoulli sampling algorithm did. It only needs a fixed look-up table of very small size (e.g., 128 bits) that stores the binary expansion of ln2. We also propose a noncentered version of Bernoulli sampling algorithm for discrete Gaussian distributions with varying centers over the integers. It requires no floating-point arithmetic and can support centers of precision up to 52 bits. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithms have a significant improvement in the sampling efficiency as compared to other rejection algorithms.