HyPHEN: A Hybrid Packing Method and Optimizations for Homomorphic Encryption-Based Neural Networks

Abstract

Convolutional neural network (CNN) inference using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a promising private inference (PI) solution due to the capability of FHE that enables offloading the whole computation process to the server while protecting the privacy of sensitive user data. However, prior FHE-based CNN (HCNN) implementations are far from being practical due to the high computational and memory overheads of FHE. To overcome this limitation, we present HyPHEN, a deep HCNN construction that features an efficient FHE convolution algorithm, data packing methods (hybrid packing and image slicing), and FHE-specific optimizations. Such enhancements enable HyPHEN to substantially reduce the memory footprint and the number of expensive homomorphic operations, such as ciphertext rotation and bootstrapping. As a result, HyPHEN brings the latency of HCNN CIFAR-10 inference down to a practical level at 1.40s (ResNet20) and demonstrates HCNN ImageNet inference for the first time at 16.87s (ResNet18).