SHARP: A Short-Word Hierarchical Accelerator for Robust and Practical Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an emerging cryptographic technology that guarantees the privacy of sensitive user data by enabling direct computations on encrypted data. Despite the security benefits of this approach, FHE is associated with prohibitively high levels of computational and memory overhead, preventing its widespread use in real-world services. Numerous domain-specific hardware designs have been proposed to address this issue, but most of them use excessive amounts of chip area and power, leaving room for further improvements in terms of practicality. We propose SHARP, a robust and practical accelerator for FHE. We analyze the implications of various hardware design choices on the functionality, performance, and efficiency of FHE. We conduct a multifaceted analysis of the impacts of the machine word length choice on the FHE acceleration, which, despite its importance with regard to hardware efficiency, has yet to be explored due to its complex correlation with various FHE parameters. A relatively short word length of 36 bits is discovered to be a robust and efficient solution for FHE accelerators. We devise an efficient hierarchical SHARP microarchitecture with a novel data organization and specialized functional units and substantially reduce the on-chip memory capacity requirement through architectural and software enhancements. This study demonstrates that SHARP delivers superior performance over prior FHE accelerators with a distinctly smaller chip area and lower power budget.