Intel HERACLES: Homomorphic Encryption Revolutionary Accelerator with Correctness for Learning-oriented End-to-End Solutions

”Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a form of encryption that allows direct operations on encrypted data without ever decrypting. Using FHE has the potential to elevate the bar of confidentiality in existing security solutions by both protecting data owner’s privacy and greatly reducing the data custodian/processor risk of third-party data leakage. Unfortunately, software FHE on existing hardware platforms can come with prohibitive overheads, increasing latency by as much as six orders of magnitude as compared to cleartext processing time.

Intel® HERACLES is a novel near-memory computer architecture with tightly connected functional units, distributed memory, and standard CXL/PCIe interface to host, that accelerates FHE programs by natively processing ring polynomials. Furthermore, Intel® HERACLES supports features such as on-line twiddle factor generation and key-switching material expansion to reduce the overhead of meta-data and key-material movement for critical NTT/iNTT and key-switching operations. Intel® HERACLES software stack leverages that FHE programs are composed of static data oblivious dataflows which can be scheduled optimally offline. The software stack also leverages the state-of-the-art FHE algorithms to deliver best in class performance and energy efficiency.

Overall, HERACLES can bridge the aspiration to reality gap with FHE by delivering massive speedup on FHE programs relative to a state-of-the-art data center CPU in a form factor of typical data center attached accelerator

Dr. Rosario Cammarota

Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Labs on March 22, 2024 at 10:15 AM in EB2 1231

Rosario “Ro” Cammarota is a senior principal engineer, head of privacy-enhancing computing research at Intel Labs. His research interests are at the intersection of cryptography, AI, and hardware security, focusing on encrypted data processing theory, application, and standardization. He is the principal investigator of the Intel HERACLES program, and the lead editor for standardizing fully homomorphic encryption at ISO/IEC. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. Ro is one of the recipients of the SRC Outstanding Liaison Award in 2017, 2018, and 2019. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of California at Irvine in 2013.

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