• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
SRI logo
  • About
    • Press room
    • Our history
  • Expertise
    • Advanced imaging systems
    • Artificial intelligence
    • Biomedical R&D services
    • Biomedical sciences
    • Computer vision
    • Cyber & formal methods
    • Education and learning
    • Innovation strategy and policy
    • National security
    • Ocean & space
    • Quantum
    • Robotics, sensors & devices
    • Speech & natural language
    • Video test & measurement
  • Ventures
  • NSIC
  • Careers
  • Contact
  • 日本支社
Search
Close
Press release March 8, 2021

SRI International awarded $11.5 million DARPA contract to accelerate fully homomorphic encryption

A practical fully homomorphic encryption capability could secure data being processed on, and sent to, untrusted clouds, and especially the volumes of data required to train AI and ML models

MENLO PARK, Calif, March 8, 2021 – SRI International today announced that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has awarded the research institute an $11.5 million contract to develop a new hardware accelerator chip to support fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). The resulting hardware and supporting software solution could enable practical FHE, which has broad commercial implications, such as accelerating the computations required to process large volumes of sensitive data for machine learning and to train artificial intelligence and enhancing security for data hosted in untrusted cloud computing platforms.

With most data encryption strategies, data has to be decrypted before processing, which presents security and privacy concerns. FHE enables computations to be performed on encrypted data rather than rather than clear plaintext, but FHE-based computations involve “noise” that accumulates with each computation, that may ultimately render the encrypted result of the computations undecryptable. Solving the problem will require a new type of accelerator CPU architecture and supporting software to speed up processing time which will reduce overhead and control the noise. The DARPA contract is part of a larger initiative named DPRIVE, Data Protection in Virtual Environments, with the stated goal of developing a
chip to accelerate FHE.

SRI has assembled a world-class team of researchers and engineers for this initiative. “Creating a new hardware accelerator for FHE encrypted data is a unique technical challenge that requires expertise in co-processor architectures, hardware design, computer-aided verification of hardware, software, mathematics and FHE algorithms,” said Dr. Karim Eldefrawy, Principal Computer Scientist for the Computer Science Lab (CSL) at SRI International. “With the team of word-class researchers we have assembled for this project, we are confident that in a few years we can develop a viable hardware solution that will make FHE data processing practical and commercially viable for a large set of applications.”

###

Media contact:
Nicole Boyd
Firecracker PR
nicole@firecrackerpr.com
(888) 317-4687 ext. 711

SRI International

SRI International creates world-changing solutions making people safer, healthier and more productive. SRI, a research center headquartered in Menlo Park, California, works primarily in advanced technology and systems, biosciences, computing and education. SRI brings its innovations to the marketplace through technology licensing, spin-off ventures and new product solutions.

Share this

How can we help?

Once you hit send…

We’ll match your inquiry to the person who can best help you.

Expect a response within 48 hours.

Career call to action image

Make your own mark.

Search jobs

Our work

Case studies

Publications

Timeline of innovation

Areas of expertise

Institute

Leadership

Press room

Media inquiries

Compliance

Careers

Job listings

Contact

SRI Ventures

Our locations

Headquarters

333 Ravenswood Ave
Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA

+1 (650) 859-2000

Subscribe to our newsletter


日本支社
SRI International
  • Contact us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Cookies
  • DMCA
  • Copyright © 2023 SRI International
Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}