Abstract:
Homomorphic Encryption makes privacy preserving computing possible in a third party owned cloud by enabling computation on the encrypted data of users. However, software ...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Homomorphic Encryption makes privacy preserving computing possible in a third party owned cloud by enabling computation on the encrypted data of users. However, software implementations of homomorphic encryption are very slow on general purpose processors. With the emergence of `FPGAs as a service', hardware-acceleration of computationally heavy workloads in the cloud are getting popular. In this article we propose HEAWS, a domain-specific coprocessor architecture for accelerating homomorphic function evaluation on the encrypted data using high-performance FPGAs available in the Amazon AWS cloud. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to report hardware acceleration of homomorphic encryption using Amazon AWS FPGAs. Utilizing the massive size of the AWS FPGAs, we design a high-performance and parallel coprocessor architecture for the FV homomorphic encryption scheme which has become popular for computing exact arithmetic on the encrypted data. We design parallel building blocks and apply pipeline processing at different levels of the implementation hierarchy, and on top of such optimizations we instantiate multiple parallel coprocessors in the FPGA to execute several homomorphic computations simultaneously. While the absolute computation time can be reduced by deploying more computational resources, efficiency of the HW/SW communication interface plays an important role in homomorphic encryption as it is computation as well as data intensive. Our implementation utilizes state of the art 512-bit XDMA feature of high bandwidth communication available in the AWS Shell to reduce the overhead of HW/SW data transfer. Moreover, we explore the design-space to identify optimal off-chip data transfer strategy for feeding the parallel coprocessors in a time-shared manner. As a result of these optimizations, our AWS-based accelerator can perform 613 homomorphic multiplications per second for a parameter set that enables homomorphic computations of depth 4. Finally, we be...
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Computers ( Volume: 69, Issue: 8, 01 August 2020)