Design and Implementation of Compact and Scalable Hardware Accelerator for Approximate Homomorphic Encryption 

Abstract: Approximate arithmetic-based homomorphic encryption (HE) scheme CKKS is arguably the most suitable one for real-world data-privacy applications due to its wider computation range than other HE schemes such as BGV, FV and BFV. However, the most crucial homomorphic operation of CKKS called key-switching induces a great amount of computational burden in actual deployment situations, and creates scalability challenges for hardware acceleration. In this talk, I will present the hardware design and implementation of a novel compact and scalable accelerator for CKKS on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. This accelerator addresses the mentioned computational and scalability challenges in homomorphic operations, including key-exchange, homomorphic multiplication, homomorphic addition, and rescaling. I hope that this talk will attract more research on the hardware acceleration for FHE development and further possible standardization.

Bio: Dr. Jiafeng Xie is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Villanova University. His research interests include post-quantum security engineering, fully homomorphic encryption, hardware security, and digital design for large-scale computing systems. Dr. Xie has served as technical committee member for many reputed conferences such as ICCAD, HOST, DAC, etc. He is also currently serving as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, Microelectronics Journal, and IEEE Access. He is also serving as the Senior Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-II. He received the IEEE Access Outstanding Associate Editor for the year of 2019. He also received the 2022 IEEE Philadelphia Section Merrill Buckley Jr. Student Project Award, the Best Paper Award from IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust 2019 (HOST'19), and IEEE Philadelphia Section Engineer of the Year Award 2024.