Trends in Hardware Acceleration Techniques for Fully Homomorphic Encryption Operations

완전동형암호 연산 가속 하드웨어 기술 동향

As the demand for big data and big data-based artificial intelligence (AI) technology increases, the need for privacy preservations for sensitive information contained in big data and for high-speed encryption-based AI computation systems also increases. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a representative encryption technology that preserves the privacy of sensitive data. Therefore, FHE technology is being actively investigated primarily because, with FHE, decryption of the encrypted data is not required in the entire data flow. Data can be stored, transmitted, combined, and processed in an encrypted state. Moreover, FHE is based on an NP-hard problem (Lattice problem) that cannot be broken, even by a quantum computer, because of its high computational complexity and difficulty. FHE boasts a high-security level and therefore is receiving considerable attention as next-generation encryption technology. However, despite being able to process computations on encrypted data, the slow computation speed due to the high computational complexity of FHE technology is an obstacle to practical use. To address this problem, hardware technology that accelerates FHE operations is receiving extensive research attention. This article examines research trends associated with developments in hardware technology focused on accelerating the operations of representative FHE schemes. In addition, the detailed structures of hardware that accelerate the FHE operation are described.