Efficient Homomorphic Encryption Accelerator With Integrated PRNG Using Low-Cost FPGA

With the wide adoption of cloud computing paradigm, it is important to develop appropriate techniques to protect client data privacy in the cloud. Encryption is one of the major techniques that could be used to achieve this goal. However, data encryption at the rest alone is insufficient for secure cloud computation environments. There is also the need for efficient techniques to carry out computation over encrypted data. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and garbled circuits are naturally used to process encrypted data without leaking any information about the data. However, existing FHE schemes are inefficient for processing large amount of data in cloud and garbled circuits are one time programs and cannot be reused. Based on quaternion/octonion algebra and Jordan algebra over finite rings \(\mathbb {Z}_q\), this paper designs efficient fully homomorphic symmetric key encryption (FHE) schemes without bootstrapping (that is, noise-free FHE schemes) that are secure in the weak ciphertext-only security model assuming the hardness of solving multivariate quadratic equation systems and solving univariate high degree polynomial equation systems in \(\mathbb {Z}_q\). The FHE scheme designed in this paper is sufficient for privacy preserving computation in cloud.

Abstract: Encryption is essential in preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data in light of the growing concerns about data security in cloud computing. Homomorphic encryption promises to enable secure calculations on encrypted data without the need for decryption, particularly for cloud-based operations. To evaluate the effectiveness and applicability of several homomorphic encryption algorithms for safe cloud computing, we compare and contrast them in this research paper. Partially homomorphic encryption (PHE), somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE), and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) are the three basic homomorphic encryption subtypes that we examine. The implications of this study can aid cloud service providers and organizations in selecting the most appropriate homomorphic encryption scheme based on their specific security requirements and performance considerations. The research contributes to the ongoing efforts to enhance data privacy in cloud computing environments, opening new possibilities for secure data processing in an increasingly connected digital world. The exploration of homomorphic encryption schemes in this study opens new avenues for research and development in the field of cryptographic techniques. As technology continues to evolve, so too must our approaches to safeguarding data. This research serves as a catalyst for further innovations in homomorphic encryption algorithms, enabling even more efficient and robust methods for secure data processing in cloud environments and beyond. The insights derived from this research paper not only empower cloud service providers and organizations to make informed decisions about selecting the most appropriate homomorphic encryption scheme but also contribute to the broader mission of fortifying data privacy and security in cloud computing.

We present new constructions of multi-party homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) based on a new primitive that we call homomorphic encryption with decryption to shares (HEDS). Our first construction, which we call \(\mathsf {Scooby} \), is based on many popular fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes with a linear decryption property. \(\mathsf {Scooby} \) achieves an n-party HSS for general circuits with complexity \(O(|F| + \log n)\), as opposed to \(O(n^2 \cdot |F|)\) for the prior best construction based on multi-key FHE. \(\mathsf {Scooby} \) can be based on (ring)-LWE with a super-polynomial modulus-to-noise ratio. In our second construction, \(\mathsf {Scrappy} \), assuming any generic FHE plus HSS for NC1-circuits, we obtain a HEDS scheme which does not require a super-polynomial modulus. While these schemes all require FHE, in another instantiation, \(\mathsf {Shaggy} \), we show how in some cases it is possible to obtain multi-party HSS without FHE, for a small number of parties and constant-degree polynomials. Finally, we show that our \(\mathsf {Scooby} \) scheme can be adapted to use multi-key fully homomorphic encryption, giving more efficient spooky encryption and setup-free HSS. This latter scheme, \(\mathsf {Casper} \), if concretely instantiated with a B/FV-style multi-key FHE scheme, for functions F which do not require bootstrapping, gives an HSS complexity of \(O(n \cdot |F| + n^2 \cdot \log n)\).

With the emerging techniques of wireless communication and cloud computing, large volumes of multimedia data are outsourced from resource constrained users to the cloud with abundant resource for both delegated storage and computation. Unfortunately, there is a risk of users’ image privacy leakage in the process of outsourcing to untrusted cloud. Most of the existing work achieved privacy-preserving image feature extraction and matching by using public key (fully) homomorphic encryption (FHE), but the heavy computational overhead and communication overhead cannot adapt to resource-constrained mobile devices. Other works disabled to realize image denoising in the encrypted domain or only focused on the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor that is inappropriate for position-sensitive feature extraction. To address these issues, in this paper, a privacy-preserving shape context based image denoising and matching protocol PPOIM with efficient outsourcing is proposed. Firstly, to improve the accuracy of image matching, a privacy-preserving image denoising scheme PPID is proposed without exploiting public key FHE. Then, based on PPID, a privacy-preserving image matching protocol PPOIM adopting shape context descriptor is devised, where two secure and efficient comparison and counting protocols in the encrypted domain are presented. All the original image privacy, query image privacy and image matching result privacy are well protected. Finally, formal security proof and extensive simulations on real-world data sets demonstrate the efficiency and practicability of our proposed PPOIM.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is the holy grail of encrypted communications. It opens the door to several advanced functionalities to overcome the security and trust issues of the IT world. After 2009, once Craig Gentry had shown that FHE could be achieved, a study in this field boomed, and significant improvement was made in identifying more efficient and realistic programs. FHE is primitive cryptography that enables arbitrary functions to be calculated via encrypted data. These systems are applicable in different ways since they permit users to encrypt their private information securely while still outsourcing the processing of protected data without fearing disclosing the real data. In 2012, LTV12 presented the first multi-key FHE system and demonstrated the possibility of using multi-key systems in somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE). Like in the one key context, there have been many advances in the field, but no effort has been made to develop the multi-key methods. This paper presents a discussion of FHE and MKFHE with a specific focus on the current techniques and three implementations, comprising the first in the multi-key setups, to the extent of our understanding.

Accelerating the development of a practical Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme is the goal of the DARPA PROCEED program. For the past year, this program has had as its focus the acceleration of various aspects of the FHE concept toward practical implementation and use. FHE would be a game-changing technology to enable secure, general computation on encrypted data, e.g., on untrusted off-site hardware. However, FHE will still require several orders of magnitude improvement in computation before it will be practical for widespread use. Recent theoretical breakthroughs demonstrated the existence of FHE schemes [1, 2], and to date much progress has been made in both algorithmic and implementation improvements. Specifically our contribution to the Proceed program has been the development of FPGA based hardware primitives to accelerate the computation on encrypted data using FHE based on lattice techniques [3]. Our project, SIPHER, has been using a state of the art tool-chain developed by Mathworks to implement VHDL code for FPGA circuits directly from Simulink models. Our baseline Homomorphic Encryption prototypes are developed directly in Matlab using the fixed point toolbox to perform the required integer arithmetic. Constant improvements in algorithms require us to be able to quickly implement them in a high level language such as Matlab. We reported on our initial results at HPEC 2011 [4]. In the past year, increases in algorithm complexity have introduced several new design requirements for our FPGA implementation. This report presents new Simulink primitives that had to be developed to deal with these new requirements.

Secure report is the problem of a client that retrieves all records matching specified attributes from a database table at the server (e.g. cloud), as in SQL SELECT queries, but where the query and the database are encrypted. Here, only the client has the secret key, but still the server is expected to compute and return the encrypted result. Secure report is theoretically possible with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). However, the current state-of-the-art solutions are realized by a polynomial of degree that is at least linear in the number m of records, which is too slow in practice even for very small databases. We present the first solution that is realized by a polynomial that attains degree independent of the number of records m, as well as the first implementation of an FHE solution to Secure report. This is by suggesting a novel paradigm that forges a link between cryptography and modern data summarization techniques known as coresets (core-sets), and sketches in particular. The key idea is to compute only a coreset of the desired report. Since the coreset is small, the client can quickly decode the desired report that the server computes after decrypting the coreset. We implemented our main reporting system in an open source library. This is the first implemented system that can answer such database queries when processing only FHE encrypted data and queries. As our analysis promises, the experimental results show that we can run Secure report queries on billions records in minutes on an Amazon EC2 server, compared to less than a hundred-thousands in previous FHE based solutions.

Statistical confidentiality focuses on protecting data to preserve its analytical value while preventing identity exposure, ensuring privacy and security in any system handling sensitive information. Homomorphic encryption allows computations on encrypted data without revealing it to anyone other than an owner or an authorized collector. When combined with other techniques, homomorphic encryption offers an ideal solution for ensuring statistical confidentiality. TFHE (Fast Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus) is a fully homomorphic encryption scheme that supports efficient homomorphic operations on Booleans and integers. Building on TFHE, Zama’s Concrete project offers an open-source compiler that translates high-level Python code (version 3.9 or higher) into secure homomorphic computations. This study examines the feasibility of the Concrete compiler to perform core statistical analyses on encrypted data. We implement traditional algorithms for core statistical measures including the mean, variance, and five-point summary on encrypted datasets. Additionally, we develop a bitonic sort implementation to support the five-point summary. All implementations are executed within the Concrete framework, leveraging its built-in optimizations. Their performance is systematically evaluated by measuring circuit complexity, programmable bootstrapping count (PBS), compilation time, and execution time. We compare these results to findings from previous studies wherever possible. The results show that the complexity of sorting and statistical computations on encrypted data with the Concrete implementation of TFHE increases rapidly, and the size and range of data that can be accommodated is small for most applications. Nevertheless, this work reinforces the theoretical promise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) for statistical analysis and highlights a clear path forward: the development of optimized, FHE-compatible algorithms.

Classifying images has become a straightforward and accessible task, thanks to the advent of Deep Neural Networks. Nevertheless, not much attention is given to the privacy concerns associated with sensitive data contained in images. In this study, we propose a solution to this issue by exploring an intersection between Machine Learning and cryptography. In particular, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) emerges as a promising solution, as it enables computations to be performed on encrypted data. We therefore propose a Residual Network implementation based on FHE which allows the classification of encrypted images, ensuring that only the user can see the result. We suggest a circuit which reduces the memory requirements by more than [Formula: see text] compared to the most recent works, while maintaining a high level of accuracy and a short computational time. We implement the circuit using the well-known Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS) scheme, which enables approximate encrypted computations. We evaluate the results from three perspectives: memory requirements, computational time and calculations precision. We demonstrate that it is possible to evaluate an encrypted ResNet20 in less than five minutes on a laptop using approximately 15[Formula: see text]GB of memory, achieving an accuracy of 91.67% on the CIFAR-10 dataset, which is almost equivalent to the accuracy of the plain model (92.60%).

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a post-quantum secure cryptographic technology that enables privacy-preserving computing on an untrusted platform without divulging any secret or sensitive information. The core of FHE is the bootstrapping algorithm, which is the intermediate refreshing procedure of a processed ciphertext. However, this step has been the computational bottleneck that prevents real-world deployments among various FHE schemes. This paper, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time, presents a scalable and ultra-highly parallel design for the number theoretic transform (NTT)-based polynomial multiplier with a variable number of reconfigurable processing elements (PEs). Hence, the highest degree of acceleration can be achieved for any targeted hardware platform by implementing as many PEs as possible under the resource constraint. The corresponding addressing and scheduling schemes are also proposed to avoid memory access conflict for the PEs, which yields an extremely high utilization ratio of 99.18% on average. In addition, the latency of the proposed design with the general negative wrapped convolution algorithm is reduced by 59.20% compared to prior works.

Garbled computation in cloud

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows computing on encrypted data, enabling secure offloading of computation to untrusted servers. Though it provides ideal security, FHE is prohibitively expensive when executed in software. These overheads are a major barrier to FHE's widespread adoption. We present F1, the first FHE accelerator that is capable of executing full FHE programs. F1 builds on an in-depth architectural analysis of the characteristics of FHE computations that reveals acceleration opportunities. F1 is a wide-vector processor with novel functional units deeply specialized to FHE primitives, such as modular arithmetic, number-theoretic transforms, and structured permutations. This organization provides so much compute throughput that data movement becomes the bottleneck. Thus, F1 is primarily designed to minimize data movement. F1 is the first system to accelerate complete FHE programs, and outperforms state-of-the-art software implementations by gmean 5,400x. These speedups counter FHE's overheads and enable new applications, like real-time private deep learning in the cloud.

The secure and efficient processing of private information in the cloud computing paradigm is still an open issue. New security threats arise with the increasing volume of data into cloud storage, where cloud providers require high levels of trust, and data breaches are significant problems. Encrypting the data with conventional schemes is considered the best option to avoid security problems. However, a decryption process is necessary when the data must be processed, but it falls into the initial problem of data vulnerability. The user cannot operate on the data directly and must download it to perform the computations locally. In this context, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is considered the holy grail of cryptography in order to solve cybersecurity problems, it allows a non-trustworthy third-party resource to blindly process encrypted information without disclosing confidential data. FHE is a valuable capability in a world of distributed computation and heterogeneous networking. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of theoretical concepts, state-of-the-art, limitations, potential applications, and development tools in the domain of FHE. Moreover, we show the intersection of FHE and machine learning from a theoretical and a practical point of view and identify potential research directions to enrich Machine Learning as a Service, a new paradigm of cloud computing. Specifically, this paper aims to be a guide to researchers and practitioners interested in learning, applying, and extending knowledge in FHE over machine learning.KeywordsCloud securityFully homomorphic encryptionMachine learning as a service

This article was written by my colleague, Cathie Yun. Cathie is an applied cryptographer and security engineer, currently working with me to make fully homomorphic encryption a reality at Google. She’s also done a lot of cool stuff with zero knowledge proofs. In previous articles, we’ve discussed techniques used in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) schemes.

Homomorphic encryption enables computations with encrypted data, however, in its plain form, it does not guarantee that the computation has been performed honestly. For the Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a verifiable variant emerged soon after the introduction of FHE itself, for a single-operation homomorphic encryption (HE), particular verifiable variant has been introduced recently, called the VeraGreg Framework. In this paper, we identify a weakness of List Non-Malleability as defined for the VeraGreg framework—an analogy to the classical Non-Malleability—and define a stronger variant, which addresses the weakness and which we show not to be strengthenable any more. Next, we suggest a decomposition of the abstract VeraGreg framework, introduce novel notions of security for the resulting components and show some reductions between them and/or their combinations. We conjecture that VeraGreg achieves the strongest (and desirable) security guarantee if and only if its building blocks achieve certain, much more tangible properties. Finally, we suggest a simplification to the original VeraGreg instantiation, which now relies on hardness of particular kind of the famous Shortest Vector Problem for lattices.