SIPHER: Scalable Implementation of Primitives for Homomorphic Encryption

Improving the efficiency and scalability of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).

Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, NY

Prior to the Proceed program, the main challenges preventing practical demonstrations and use of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) were efficiency and scalability. At the start of the Program, the state-of-the-art FHE implementations were both inefficient and not scalable. Work in Scalable Implementation of Primitives for Homomorphic EncRyption (SIPHER) has brought FHE into the realm of practice, bringing several orders of magnitude runtime improvement, and resulting in FHE implementations that can be executed on single and multi-core computers (including iPhones). Furthermore, implementation of an FHE hardware accelerator on a Virtex 7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can speed up core FHE functions by over three orders of magnitude.

Previous FHE schemes were inefficient because the underlying algorithms and their implementations took too long to run at an appropriate level of assured security. Similarly, these