CAREER: Accelerating General-Purpose Encrypted Computation on Diverse Hardware

In recent years, cloud computing has risen to unparalleled societal importance, as it enables a broad range of applications, including healthcare services, social media, banking and electronic commerce. As a result, cloud services have access to the digital data of millions of users and become a lucrative target for criminals and cyberattacks. Sensitive data are stolen from cloud servers, incurring significant financial losses to those impacted. To address the shortcomings of current protection technologies in cloud computing, this project employs advanced cryptography and introduces new privacy protections that allow data to remain secure even when the cloud service is compromised. The project's novelties are in the judicious design of computers that can understand and process encrypted information such that, even if data are stolen or under attack, they will be incomprehensible to the attacker. The project's broader significance and importance is in addressing the urgent need of the cloud computing industry to mitigate the impact of cyberattacks and to protect the privacy of users, which is aligned with the mission of the National Science Foundation. The key observation in this project is that data are immune to leakage threats as long as they remain encrypted at all times, including during processing. Towards that end, the investigator employs a special form of encryption, called Fully Homomorphic Encryption, to protect general-purpose computation using diverse hardware platforms such as graphics processing units. Specifically, this project defines imperative models of computation that improve the programmability of encrypted data processing, without sacrificing execution performance. These models are complemented with real-life applications such as privacy-preserving machine learning and data mining that harness the power of encrypted computation. The results of this project are integrated with educational activities, including web-based learning environments and cybersecurity competitions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.