The proliferation of cloud computing has led to heightened concerns regarding the security and privacy of sensitive data, as their need to be decrypted before processing, renders them susceptible to potential breaches. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) serves as a countermeasure to this issue by enabling computation to be executed directly on encrypted data. Nevertheless, the execution of FHE is orders of magnitude slower compared to unencrypted computation, thereby impeding its practicality and adoption. Therefore, enhancing the performance of FHE is crucial for its implementation in real-world scenarios. In this study, we elaborate on our endeavors to design, implement, fabricate, and post-silicon validate a co-processor for FHE, named CoFHEE. With a compact design area of 12mm^2 , CoFHEE features ASIC implementations of fundamental polynomial operations, including polynomial addition and subtraction, Hadamard product, and Number Theoretic Transform, which underlie all higher-level FHE primitives. CoFHEE is capable of natively supporting polynomial degrees of up to n = 2^14 with a coefficient size of 128 bits, and has been fabricated and silicon-verified using 55nm CMOS technology. To evaluate it, we conduct performance and power experiments on our chip, and compare it to state-of-the-art software implementations and other ASIC designs.

翻译：云计算的发展引发了对敏感数据安全与隐私的严重关切，因为数据在处理前需要解密，使其易受潜在泄露风险的影响。全同态加密（FHE）通过允许直接在加密数据上执行计算，成为解决这一问题的有效手段。然而，FHE的执行速度比非加密计算慢数个数量级，从而阻碍了其实用性和推广。因此，提升FHE的性能对其在现实场景中的应用至关重要。本研究详细阐述了我们在设计、实现、制造及硅后验证一款名为CoFHEE的FHE协处理器方面的工作。CoFHEE的紧凑设计面积为12mm²，集成了基础多项式运算的ASIC实现，包括多项式加法与减法、哈达玛积以及数论变换，这些运算构成了所有高级FHE原语的基础。CoFHEE能够原生支持最高n=2^14的多项式次数和128比特的系数大小，并采用55nm CMOS工艺制造并完成硅验证。为进行性能评估，我们在芯片上开展了性能和功耗实验，并将其与最先进的软件实现及其他ASIC设计方案进行了对比。