1 research outputs found
A First Practical Fully Homomorphic Crypto-Processor Design: The Secret Computer is Nearly Here
Following a sequence of hardware designs for a fully homomorphic
crypto-processor - a general purpose processor that natively runs encrypted
machine code on encrypted data in registers and memory, resulting in encrypted
machine states - proposed by the authors in 2014, we discuss a working
prototype of the first of those, a so-called `pseudo-homomorphic' design. This
processor is in principle safe against physical or software-based attacks by
the owner/operator of the processor on user processes running in it. The
processor is intended as a more secure option for those emerging computing
paradigms that require trust to be placed in computations carried out in remote
locations or overseen by untrusted operators.
The prototype has a single-pipeline superscalar architecture that runs
OpenRISC standard machine code in two distinct modes. The processor runs in the
encrypted mode (the unprivileged, `user' mode, with a long pipeline) at 60-70%
of the speed in the unencrypted mode (the privileged, `supervisor' mode, with a
short pipeline), emitting a completed encrypted instruction every 1.67-1.8
cycles on average in real trials.Comment: 6 pages, draf