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Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a cryptographic technique that enables privacy-preserving computation. State-of-the-art Boolean FHE implementations provide a very low-level interface, usually exposing a limited set of Boolean gates that programmers must use to write their FHE applications. This programming model is unnecessarily restrictive: many Boolean FHE schemes supportprogrammable bootstrapping, an operation that allows evaluation of an arbitrary fixed-size lookup table. However, most modern FHE compilers are only capable of reasoning about traditional Boolean circuits, and therefore struggle to take full advantage of programmable bootstrapping. We present COATL, an FHE compiler that makes use of programmable bootstrapping to produce circuits that are smaller and more efficient than their traditional Boolean counterparts. COATL generates circuits usingarithmetic lookup tables, a novel abstraction we introduce for reasoning about computations in Boolean FHE programs. We demonstrate on a variety of benchmarks that COATL can generate circuits that run up to 1.5× faster than those generated by other state-of-the-art compilation strategies.
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This content will become publicly available on February 20, 2026
HELM: Navigating Homomorphic Encryption Through Gates and Lookup Tables
As cloud computing continues to gain widespread adoption, safeguarding the confidentiality of data entrusted to third-party cloud service providers becomes a critical concern. While traditional encryption methods offer protection for data at rest and in transit, they fall short when it comes to where it matters the most, i.e., during data processing. To address this limitation, we present HELM, a framework for privacy-preserving data processing using homomorphic encryption. HELM automatically transforms arbitrary programs expressed in a Hardware Description Language (HDL), such as Verilog, into equivalent homomorphic circuits, which can then be efficiently evaluated using encrypted inputs. HELM features three modes of encrypted evaluation: a) a gate mode that consists of Boolean gates, b) a small-precision lookup table mode which significantly reduces the size of the circuit by combining multiple gates into lookup tables, and c) a high-precision lookup table mode tuned for multi-bit arithmetic evaluations. Finally, HELM introduces a scheduler that leverages the parallelism inherent in arithmetic and Boolean circuits to efficiently evaluate encrypted programs. We evaluate HELM with the ISCAS'85 and ISCAS'89 benchmark suites, as well as real-world applications such as image filtering and neural network inference. In our experimental results, we report that HELM can outperform prior works by up to 65x.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2239334
- PAR ID:
- 10596471
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
- Volume:
- 20
- ISSN:
- 1556-6013
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2822 to 2835
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Applied cryptography circuit evaluation homomorphic encryption privacy-preserving computation
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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