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Hardware Acceleration for Computing on Encrypted Data

Project description

Encrypted data technology for secure electronics

Nearly all aspects of daily life rely on electronics, generating enormous amounts of data which are stored encrypted on cloud servers whose security is at best questionable. Computing on encrypted data is a new technology in cryptography, which enables calculations on the data without the need to decrypt them. The EU-funded BELFORT project intends to make this technology feasible from a hardware perspective and in realistic scenarios, providing the best performance and energy balance to run on cloud servers and edge devices within reasonable memory, computation and energy budgets. The project proposes reconfigurable hardware-based acceleration with domain-specific programmable coprocessors that combine energy efficiency and resistance to attacks from classic and quantum computers.

Objective

Electronics are part of all aspects of our daily life, at home, at work, while on the road. Smart cities, medical devices, financial transactions, self-driving cars, all rely on electronics. At the same time, these activities generate huge amounts of data, which for privacy and security reasons, are stored encrypted on a possibly untrusted cloud server. Yet, many applications benefit from operations on this data. Statistics or machine learning on medical, financial, automotive or energy data could discover trends or abuse, could be used to monitor pandemics, to tune supply and demand, and much more. Ideally, the calculations on the data should be done without decrypting them first to avoid data leaks.
Computing on encrypted data is the new magic in the field of cryptography: it enables calculations on the encrypted data, while data remains encrypted in the cloud and without the need to decrypt it. The result will only be decrypted by the final recipient. Challenging in these novel mathematical concepts is a gigantic blow-up in the size of ciphertext data, in the amount of calculations on the encrypted data, and in the novel lattice based arithmetic used.
The core challenge addressed in BELFORT is to make this new technology feasible from a hardware perspective and in realistic scenarios, providing the best performance/energy balance, for it to run on cloud servers and edge devices, within reasonable memory, computation and energy budgets. We propose reconfigurable hardware-based acceleration with domain-specific programmable co-processors, which combine energy efficiency with domain specific programmability and with resistance to attacks from classic and quantum computers. We will develop multiple new ideas as well as bring them together in an end-to-end demonstrator.
The PI has the unique expertise and is a pioneer in translating novel cryptographic algorithms into efficient and secure realizations on a wide range of hardware/software platforms.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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ERC-ADG - Advanced Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2020-ADG

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Host institution

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 425 875,00
Address
OUDE MARKT 13
3000 Leuven
Belgium

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Region
Vlaams Gewest Prov. Vlaams-Brabant Arr. Leuven
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 2 425 875,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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