Poseidon: Practical Homomorphic Encryption Accelerator

With the development of the important solution for privacy computing, the explosion of data size and computing intensity in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has brought enormous challenges to the hardware design. In this paper, we propose a practical FHE accelerator - "Poseidon", which focuses on improving the hardware resource and bandwidth consumption. Poseidon supports complex FHE operations like Bootstrapping, Keyswitch, Rotation and so on, under limited FPGA resources. It refines these operations by abstracting five key operators: Modular Addition (MA), Modular Multiplication (MM), Number Theoretic Transformation (NTT), Automorphsim and Shared Barret Reduction (SBT). These operators are combined and reused to implement higher-level FHE operations. To utilize the FPGA resources more efficiently and improve the parallelism, we adopt the radix-based NTT algorithm and propose HFAuto, an optimized automorphism implementation suitable for FPGA. Then, we design the hardware accelerator based on the optimized key operators and HBM to maximize computational efficiency. We evaluate Poseidon with four domain-specific FHE benchmarks on Xilinx Alveo U280 FPGA. Empirical results show that the efficient reuse of the operator cores and on-chip storage enables superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art GPU, FPGA and accelerator ASICs. We highlight the following results: (1) up to 370× speedup over CPU for the basic operations of FHE; (2) up to 1300×/52× speedup over CPU and the FPGA solution for the key operators; (3) up to 10.6×/8.7× speedup over GPU and the ASIC solution for the FHE benchmark.