Co-designed accelerator for homomorphic encryption applications

Abstract

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is considered as a key cryptographic tool in building a secure cloud computing environment since it allows computing arbitrary functions directly on encrypted data. However, existing FHE implementations remain impractical due to very high time and resource costs. These costs are essentially due to the computationally intensive modular polynomial multiplication. In this paper, we present a software/hardware co-designed modular polynomial multiplier in order to accelerate homomorphic schemes. The hardware part is implemented through a High-Level Synthesis (HLS) flow. Experimental results show competitive latencies when compared with handmade designs, while maintaining large advantages on resources. Moreover, we show that our high-level description can be easily configured with different parameters and very large sizes in negligible time, generating new designs for numerous applications.