HECO: Automatic Code Optimizations for Efficient Fully Homomorphic Encryption - Alexander Viand
Channel: Protocol Labs
Date: 2022-07-05

Bio: I am a doctoral student & research assistant in the Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zürich and a member of the Privacy Preserving Systems Lab. I've received both my MSc and BSc in Computer Science from ETH Zürich. My interests include useable security and privacy, privacy enhancing technologies, and the interactions between these technologies and society. In my research, I work with secure computation technologies including Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Secure Multi-Party Computation and Zero-Knowledge Proofs, trying to make these techniques more accessible to non-experts by developing new systems, tools and abstractions. We are always looking for motivated students who are interested in conducting student thesis or projects related to my research areas. In addition to the projects listed here, you are also very welcome to send me an email to discuss further details or additional project possibilities.

Abstract: In recent years, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has undergone several breakthroughs and advancements leading to a leap in performance. Today, performance is no longer a major barrier to adoption. Instead, it is the complexity of developing an efficient FHE application that currently limits deploying FHE in practice and at scale. Several FHE compilers have emerged recently to ease FHE development. However, none of these answer how to automatically transform imperative programs to secure and efficient FHE implementations. This is a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed before we can realistically expect broader use of FHE. Automating these transformations is challenging because the restrictive set of operations in FHE and their non-intuitive performance characteristics require programs to be drastically transformed to achieve efficiency. In addition, existing tools are monolithic and focus on individual optimizations.Therefore, they fail to fully address the needs of end-to-end FHE development. In this paper, we present HECO, a new end-to-end design for FHE compilers that takes high-level imperative programs and emits efficient and secure FHE implementations. In our design, we take a broader view of FHE development, extending the scope of optimizations beyond the cryptographic challenges existing tools focus on.

Related work: 
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.01649.pdf
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