HEIR: A Unified Representation for Cross-Scheme Compilation of Fully Homomorphic Computation

Song Bian

Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024 · Day 2 · Applied Cryptography

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) stands as a cornerstone of secure multi-party computation, enabling computations on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. This powerful cryptographic primitive promises revolutionary applications in privacy-preserving machine learning, secure databases, and outsourced computation, offering advantages like low round complexity and minimal communication bandwidth. However, the widespread adoption of FHE has been severely hampered by two primary challenges: the extreme complexity of designing FHE programs, which often requires deep cryptographic expertise, and the notoriously slow execution times, with complex tasks potentially spanning hours or even days. Furthermore, the performance of an FHE program is highly sensitive to the underlying FHE scheme and data representation, forcing developers into a difficult usability-efficiency trade-off.