SHARP: A Short-Word Hierarchical Accelerator for Robust and Practical Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an emerging cryptographic technology that guarantees the privacy of sensitive user data by enabling direct computations on encrypted data. Despite the security benefits of this approach, FHE is associated with prohibitively high levels of computational and memory overhead, preventing its widespread use in real-world services. Numerous domain-specific hardware designs have been proposed to address this issue, but most of them use excessive amounts of chip area and power, leaving room for further improvements in terms of practicality.