DARPA Seeks Chips that Can Crunch Data Without Decrypting It
Current methods of doing fully homomorphic encryption require too much computing power to be used widely.
The Defense Advanced Research Agency awarded four research teams multimillion-dollar contracts to figure out how to perform computations on encrypted data faster and with less power.
The four performers for DARPA’s Data Protection in Virtual Environments program aim to build silicon chips capable of supporting Fully Homomorphic Encryption, which enables users to compute and analyze data without exposing it to compromise by decrypting it. FHE still requires far too much compute overhead to be considered a practical option, so DPRIVE performers will create brand new chips specialized for FHE.