What is FHE?
Unlike all other forms of encryption, which are typically used to protect data at rest or in transit, FHE enables computing over encrypted data. This means that data is never decrypted at any point in its lifecycle, and thus benefits from the protections afforded by strong encryption even when in use.
This enables information to remain confidential and secure even in untrusted computing environments where cyberattacks or other malicious actions may threaten confidentiality. FHE also allows for secure multi-party computing protocols, enabling trustless collaboration between organisations.
These properties collectively offer new functionality for responsible data handling, and facilitate new markets for data exchange based on privacy-preserving technologies.
The role of FHETCH
FHE is a powerful data protection technology, but implementation in the contemporary computing landscape requires a new ecosystem of tools..
FHE represents a merging of cryptography with aspects of computing. Contemporary computing is a mature ecosystem of hardware, software libraries, compilers and other toolchains. A parallel ecosystem of such technologies dedicated to the specifics of encrypted computing is needed to ensure maximum efficiency and scalability for FHE as a solution.
The role of FHETCH in developing this landscape lies at the level of hardware and software interfaces to hardware.
Our remit is the following:
- To develop hardware dedicated to overcoming the computational challenges of FHE
- To establish reliable methods of assessing FHE hardware in an applications and scalability context
- To drive and promote adoption of FHE as an effective mechanism for protecting data in use
- To educate and inform on the subject of FHE, both in a hardware context and beyond
- To serve as a reliable and trustworthy source of information for regulators, governments, and regulated industries regarding the security of FHE hardware
- To ensure Inter-compatability between different hardware solutions
- To ensure inter-compatibility between software solutions and hardware
- To support reliable and efficient security parameters for FHE cryptosystems
- To ensure open and interrogable technologies for security analysis
- To accredit implementations or methods for FHE