October 15, 2024 at 06:23PM
The FHE Technical Consortium for Hardware (FHETCH) was launched to enhance interoperability of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) hardware and software. This alliance aims to accelerate FHE product development by focusing on practical standards, hardware acceleration, and API abstraction, ensuring secure data processing while maintaining privacy across various industries.
### Meeting Takeaways
1. **Launch of FHETCH**: The FHE Technical Consortium for Hardware (FHETCH) has been established to enhance interoperability between fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) hardware and software, aiming for real-world applications.
2. **Key Participants**: The consortium includes three founding members: Niobium, Optalysys, and Chain Reaction, who are collaborating to drive the development of commercial FHE products.
3. **FHE Overview**: Fully homomorphic encryption allows for the processing of encrypted data without the need to decrypt it, thus maintaining data privacy and enabling secure data sharing in untrusted environments. This is particularly relevant in sectors such as healthcare, finance, cloud computing, and machine learning.
4. **Need for Standardization**: Niobium highlighted the necessity of practical standardization for FHE implementation, citing high costs and complexity without common technical standards.
5. **Current Challenges**: There is a notable performance gap between existing FHE solutions and the requirements for practical deployment, which FHETCH aims to address.
6. **Primary Goals of FHETCH**:
– Develop FHE hardware acceleration technologies.
– Establish open technical standards to ensure alignment with global regulatory frameworks.
– Integrate with existing data center formats and software libraries.
7. **Initial Focus Areas**: The consortium will focus on creating an API abstraction layer, facilitating the interface between any FHE hardware accelerator and any FHE library. This aims to enhance flexibility, simplify application development, and speed up the creation of new solutions.
8. **Long-term Vision**: Jorge Myszne, CPO of Niobium, emphasized that FHETCH aims to provide a shared foundation for the rapid development of FHE solutions that guarantee data privacy and long-term compliance.