<2>Intel Demos Chip To Compute With Encrypted Data
<3>Overview of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, is a method of computing on encrypted data without ever having it decrypted. This is particularly useful in scenarios where sensitive information needs to be protected, such as genetic risk of disease or voter registration data. However, FHE computing tasks can take thousands of times longer to compute on today’s CPUs and GPUs compared to working with decrypted data.
<3>Intel’s Heracles Chip
To address this issue, universities, startups, and processor giants have been working on specialized chips that can close the gap. Last month at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, Intel demonstrated its answer, Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of-the-line Intel server CPU.
<3>Heracles’ Advantages
Heracles is the first hardware that works at scale, according to Sanu Mathew, who leads security circuits research at Intel. The scale is measurable both physically and in compute performance. While other FHE research chips have been in the range of 10 square millimeters or less, Heracles is about