With Heracles, Intel has developed a prototype chip that can perform calculations on encrypted data thousands of times faster than a traditional Xeon chip.
Intel has developed a chip optimized for performing operations on encrypted data. The processor can process data without decrypting it and without a significant performance dip. Intel states that the processor processes encrypted data up to 5,547 times faster than an Intel Xeon processor with 24 cores.
The breakthrough is important for the development of an extremely secure compute architecture. Today, encrypted data is decrypted just before the CPU begins calculations. In theory, the data is secure in that context, although advanced attacks exist that allow hackers to steal data anyway. When data remains encrypted during computation, it is also protected against such attacks.
Unique architecture
To make this possible, Intel built an exotic chip. Heracles is not an x86 processor and cannot run traditional software. Furthermore, Heracles only accelerates certain types of calculations with encrypted data. Specifically, it involves calculations using the relatively rare full homomorphic encryption (FHE).
FHE combined with a chip like Heracles promises to enable secure and fast computing, but Intel isn’t solving an acute problem here. It’s not as if FHE workloads are numerous today and the chip provides a speed boost for them. Heracles is more of a scalable proof-of-concept for secure encrypted computing than an accelerator or chip that is already useful at this time.
Practical example
Intel demonstrated the chip at the ISSCC conference. One demonstration of its utility involves verifying a digitally cast vote by an eligible voter. To check this, decrypting data is not advisable. To uphold the secrecy of the ballot and protect the voter’s privacy, it is much safer to keep the data encrypted. With Heracles, it is possible to verify a cast vote in the database without the data ever becoming readable, and to do so in 14 microseconds.
A Xeon processor can also perform this task without unlocking the data, but it requires 15 milliseconds. On the scale of a single vote to be verified, that is not a negligible difference. However, when you want to verify one hundred million votes, Heracles can do it in 23 minutes, whereas a Xeon with 14 cores would need seventeen days.
With this example, Intel illustrates how FHE computing with Heracles can be useful in practice. In that respect, the processor is a breakthrough, although the future will tell whether such ultra-secure systems at the hardware level will actually catch on.