Securing the cloud with reconfigurable computing: An FPGA accelerator for homomorphic encryption

Abstract

A hot topic in current cloud security research, homomorphic encryption is a recently introduced technique allowing computation to take place on encrypted data. This work presents the architecture and implementation of a dedicated FPGA-based accelerator addressing the prohibitive computing demand of homomorphic encryption. In particular, the accelerator targets the most time consuming operation used by the encryption primitive, large integer multiplication. Based on an Altera's Stratix V FPGA platform, the prototype implementation achieves significant improvements in terms of execution time –under a comparable hardware cost– against alternative solutions previously presented in the technical literature