mmFHE: mmWave Sensing with End-to-End Fully Homomorphic Encryption

TL;DR

mmFHE introduces a novel system enabling fully homomorphic encryption for mmWave radar sensing, allowing privacy-preserving signal processing and ML inference on untrusted cloud platforms with minimal accuracy loss.

Contribution

This work is the first to implement end-to-end FHE for mmWave sensing, including a library of composable, data-oblivious kernels for secure processing pipelines.

Findings

Negligible error introduced by encryption (HR/RR MAE <10^-3 bpm)

Achieved 84.5% gesture recognition accuracy with privacy guarantees

End-to-end cloud processing latency of 103s for vital signs and 37s for gestures

Abstract

We present mmFHE, the first system that enables fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) for end-to-end mmWave radar sensing. mmFHE encrypts raw range profiles on a lightweight edge device and executes the entire mmWave signal-processing and ML inference pipeline homomorphically on an untrusted cloud that operates exclusively on ciphertexts. At the core of mmFHE is a library of seven composable, data-oblivious FHE kernels that replace standard DSP routines with fixed arithmetic circuits. These kernels can be flexibly composed into different application-specific pipelines. We demonstrate this approach on two representative tasks: vital-sign monitoring and gesture recognition. We formally prove two cryptographic guarantees for any pipeline assembled from this library: input privacy, the cloud learns nothing about the sensor data; and data obliviousness, the execution trace is identical on the cloud regardless of the data being processed. These guarantees effectively neutralize various supervised and unsupervised privacy attacks on raw data, including re-identification and data-dependent privacy leakage. Evaluation on three public radar datasets (270 vital-sign recordings, 600 gesture trials) shows that encryption introduces negligible error: HR/RR MAE <10^-3 bpm versus plaintext, and 84.5% gesture accuracy (vs. 84.7% plaintext) with end-to-end cloud GPU latency of 103s for a 10s vital-sign window and 37s for a 3s gesture window. These results show that privacy-preserving end-to-end mmWave sensing is feasible on commodity hardware today.