A Programmable SoC Implementation of the DGK Cryptosystem for Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

Date: 
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Venue: 
DSD 2020

Authors: Milad Bahadori and Kimmo Järvinen

Conference: Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD 2020)

Abstract - Additively homomorphic encryption has many applications in privacy-enhancing technologies because it allows a cloud service provider to perform simple computations with users’ data without learning the contents. The performance overhead of additively homomorphic encryption is a major obstacle for practical adaptation. Hardware accelerators could reduce this overhead substantially. In this paper, we present an implementation of the DGK cryptosystem for programmable systems-on-chip and evaluate it in real hardware. We demonstrate its efficiency for accelerating privacy-enhancing technologies by using it for computing squared Euclidean distances between a user’s input and a server’s database. We also provide comparisons with a recent implementation of Paillier cryptosystem and show that DGK offers major speed-ups. This work represents the first implementation of the DGK cryptosystem that uses hardware acceleration and demonstrates that the DGK benefits greatly from the hardware/software codesign approach.