Secure Function Evaluation Using an FPGA Overlay Architecture

Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) has received considerable attention recently due to the massive collection and mining of personal data over the Internet, but large computational costs still render it impractical. In this paper, we leverage hardware acceleration to tackle the scalability and efficiency challenges inherent in SFE. To that end, we propose a generic, reconfigurable implementation of SFE as a coarse-grained FPGA overlay architecture. Contrary to tailored approaches that are tied to the execution of a specific SFE structure, and require full reprogramming of an FPGA with each new execution, our design allows repurposing an FPGA to evaluate different SFE tasks without the need for reprogramming. Our implementation shows orders of magnitude improvement over a software package for evaluating garbled circuits, and demonstrates that the circuit being evaluated can change with almost no overhead.