SoK: Fully Homomorphic Encryption Compilers

TL;DR

This paper surveys and evaluates the current state of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) tools and compilers, analyzing their performance and usability to guide future development in secure, encrypted computation.

Contribution

It provides an extensive survey, experimental evaluation, and systematic analysis of existing FHE tools and compilers, highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and future research directions.

Findings

Performance varies significantly across FHE tools

Usability challenges hinder widespread adoption

Recommendations for improving FHE tool development

Abstract

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows a third party to perform arbitrary computations on encrypted data, learning neither the inputs nor the computation results. Hence, it provides resilience in situations where computations are carried out by an untrusted or potentially compromised party. This powerful concept was first conceived by Rivest et al. in the 1970s. However, it remained unrealized until Craig Gentry presented the first feasible FHE scheme in 2009. The advent of the massive collection of sensitive data in cloud services, coupled with a plague of data breaches, moved highly regulated businesses to increasingly demand confidential and secure computing solutions. This demand, in turn, has led to a recent surge in the development of FHE tools. To understand the landscape of recent FHE tool developments, we conduct an extensive survey and experimental evaluation to explore the current state of the art and identify areas for future development. In this paper, we survey, evaluate, and systematize FHE tools and compilers. We perform experiments to evaluate these tools' performance and usability aspects on a variety of applications. We conclude with recommendations for developers intending to develop FHE-based applications and a discussion on future directions for FHE tools development.