Program Summary
The safety and security of critical information – whether it is sensitive intellectual property (IP), financial information, personally identifiable information (PII), intelligence insight, or beyond – is of vital importance. Current methods protect data as it is transmitted across a network, at rest, or while in storage. Processing or computing on this data, however, requires that it is first decrypted, exposing it to numerous vulnerabilities and threats. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) offers a solution to this challenge. FHE enables computation on encrypted data, or ciphertext, to keep data protected at all times. The benefits of FHE are significant, from enabling the use of untrusted networks to enhancing data privacy. Despite its potential, FHE requires enormous computation time to perform even simple operations, making it exceedingly impractical to implement with traditional processing hardware. The Data Protection in Virtual Environments (DPRIVE) program seeks to enable FHE computation within a factor of ten of unencrypted computations, enabling data security for all states of data across DoD and commercial applications.
While a number of FHE solutions have been developed, running FHE in software on standard processing hardware remains untenable for practical data security applications due to the massive processing overhead. DPRIVE aims to design and develop a hardware accelerator integrating novel architectural approaches, hardware, and software to dramatically reduce the processing overhead required to implement FHE calculations. Specifically, the program seeks to develop novel approaches to memory management, flexible data structures and programming models, and formal verification methods that ensure the design of the FHE implementation is effective and accurate, while also dramatically decreasing the overhead penalty required for FHE computations. The target accelerator should reduce the computational run time overhead by many orders of magnitude compared to current software-based FHE computations on conventional CPUs, and accelerate FHE calculations to within one order of magnitude of current performance on unencrypted data.