IBM researchers posting FHE assignments on FHERMA platform

To foster innovation in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), IBM® researchers have begun publishing challenges on the FHERMA platform for FHE challenges launched by the Fair Math and OpenFHE communities in late 2023.

FHE: A new frontier in technology

Perfectly homomorphic encryption is a groundbreaking technology with enormous potential. One notable application is enhancing medical AI models. By enabling diverse research institutions to collaborate seamlessly on the educational process, FHE opens up a new era of possibilities. The ability to process encrypted data without decryption represents a significant advancement that could revolutionize a variety of fields.

IBM has been working to advance the field of FHE for 15 years, since IBM research scientist Craig Gentry first introduced a plausible fully isomorphic structure in 2009. The “bootstrapping” mechanism he developed organizes and reduces the amount of “noise” in encoded information. This made FHE widely available commercially.

Progress of FHE

FHE has made significant progress since the introduction of the first scheme. The transition from theoretical framework to practical implementation presents numerous challenges that need to be addressed. Although there are already applications using FHE, the community continues to improve and innovate the algorithm to make FHE more widely available and applicable to new domains.

Promoting innovation through challenges

The FHERMA platform was built to encourage innovation in the FHE space. You can see various challenges on the FHERMA site. These challenges stem from problems faced in real-world machine learning and blockchain applications.

A solution to the problem must be written using a known cryptographic library such as openFHE. Developers can also use higher-level libraries, such as IBM’s HElayer, to speed development and easily write powerful, common code.

The best solutions to various challenges will win prizes from Fair Math while contributing to the FHE community. Winners will also be given the opportunity to present their solutions at special workshops currently being planned.

The goal of the challenge is to foster research, popularize FHE, and develop cryptographic primitives that are efficient, general, and support a wide range of hyperparameters (e.g., efficient matrix multiplication for matrices of dimensions 1000×1000 and 10×10). write). This is consistent with IBM’s vision for privacy-preserving computing using FHE.

Drive advancement and adoption

Introducing and participating in challenges listed on the FHERMA site is an exciting and rewarding way to help advance the wider adoption of FHE while also advancing development and research in the area. We hope you will join us in this exciting effort on the FHERMA Challenge platform.

Teams and individuals who successfully solve the task will receive a cash prize from Fair Math. More importantly, innovative solutions to open challenges will help advance IBM’s long-standing goal of advancing the FHE community.

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