HELM: Navigating Homomorphic Encryption through Gates and Lookup Tables

Charles Gouert; Dimitris Mouris; Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos

Paper 2023/1382

HELM: Navigating Homomorphic Encryption through Gates and Lookup Tables

Charles Gouert

, University of Delaware

Dimitris Mouris

, University of Delaware

Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos

, University of Delaware

Abstract

As cloud computing continues to gain widespread adoption, safeguarding the confidentiality of data entrusted to third-party cloud service providers becomes a critical concern. While traditional encryption methods offer protection for data at rest and in transit, they fall short when it comes to where it matters the most, i.e., during data processing. To address this limitation, we present HELM, a framework for privacy-preserving data processing using homomorphic encryption. HELM automatically transforms arbitrary programs expressed in a Hardware Description Language (HDL), such as Verilog, into equivalent homomorphic circuits, which can then be efficiently evaluated using encrypted inputs. HELM features three modes of encrypted evaluation: a) a gate mode that consists of Boolean gates, b) a small-precision lookup table mode which significantly reduces the size of the circuit by combining multiple gates into lookup tables, and c) a high-precision lookup table mode tuned for multi-bit arithmetic evaluations. Finally, HELM introduces a scheduler that leverages the parallelism inherent in arithmetic and Boolean circuits to efficiently evaluate encrypted programs. We evaluate HELM with the ISCAS'85 and ISCAS'89 benchmark suites, as well as real-world applications such as image filtering and neural network inference. In our experimental results, we report that HELM can outperform prior works by up to 65x.

Note: The HELM framework is open-source and is available here: https://github.com/TrustworthyComputing/helm

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Published elsewhere. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2025.3544066
Keywords: Homomorphic Encryption Privacy Outsourcing Encrypted Computation Scheme Hopping
Contact author(s): cgouert @ udel edu
jimouris @ udel edu
tsoutsos @ udel edu
History: 2025-03-20: last of 2 revisions; 2023-09-15: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2023/1382
License: CC BY-SA

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1382,
      author = {Charles Gouert and Dimitris Mouris and Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos},
      title = {{HELM}: Navigating Homomorphic Encryption through Gates and Lookup Tables},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1382},
      year = {2023},
      doi = {10.1109/TIFS.2025.3544066},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1382}
}