Hardware Acceleration for Fully Homomorphic Encryption Scheme Switching from CKKS to FHEW

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) presents a paradigm-shifting framework for performing computations on encrypted data, offering revolutionary implications for privacy-preserving technologies. This paper introduces a novel hardware implementation of scheme switching between two leading FHE schemes targeting different computational needs, i.e., arithmetic HE scheme CKKS, and Boolean HE scheme FHEW. The proposed architecture facilitates dynamic switching between the schemes with improved throughput and latency compared to the software baseline. The proposed architecture computation modules support scheme switching operations involving coefficient conversion, modular switching, and key switching. We also optimize the hardware designs for the pre-processing and post-processing blocks, involving key generation, encryption, and decryption. The effectiveness of our proposed design is verified on the Xilinx U280 Datacenter Acceleration FPGA. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme switching accelerator yields a 365× performance improvement over the software counterpart.