ArctyrEX : Accelerated Encrypted Execution of General-Purpose Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces ArctyrEX, a framework that significantly accelerates fully homomorphic encryption computations, enabling practical encrypted data processing for general-purpose applications with substantial performance improvements over CPU baselines.

Contribution

We developed ArctyrEX, an end-to-end accelerated FHE execution framework that simplifies development and achieves up to 40x faster performance on GPU hardware.

Findings

40x faster evaluation on NVIDIA DGX A100

6x faster with a single A100 compared to CPU baseline

Enables practical encrypted computation for general applications

Abstract

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a cryptographic method that guarantees the privacy and security of user data during computation. FHE algorithms can perform unlimited arithmetic computations directly on encrypted data without decrypting it. Thus, even when processed by untrusted systems, confidential data is never exposed. In this work, we develop new techniques for accelerated encrypted execution and demonstrate the significant performance advantages of our approach. Our current focus is the Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus (CGGI) scheme, which is a current state-of-the-art method for evaluating arbitrary functions in the encrypted domain. CGGI represents a computation as a graph of homomorphic logic gates and each individual bit of the plaintext is transformed into a polynomial in the encrypted domain. Arithmetic on such data becomes very expensive: operations on bits become operations on entire polynomials. Therefore, evaluating even relatively simple nonlinear functions, such as a sigmoid, can take thousands of seconds on a single CPU thread. Using our novel framework for end-to-end accelerated encrypted execution called ArctyrEX, developers with no knowledge of complex FHE libraries can simply describe their computation as a C program that is evaluated over $40\times$ faster on an NVIDIA DGX A100 and $6\times$ faster with a single A100 relative to a 256-threaded CPU baseline.