Trusted Hardware Acceleration for Function Secret Sharing

Researchers presented the distributed function accelerator (DFA), a hardware accelerator targeting distributed point function (DPF) generation and evaluation, the dominant primitive in function secret sharing (FSS). DFA combines a high-throughput fixed-function AES-based pseudorandom number generation engine with a lightweight programmable unit for protocol-specific logic, and in trusted mode enables local on-the-fly key generation that eliminates key distribution. Across representative workloads, DFA reduced end-to-end latency by 10X, communication by up to 20X, and energy by more than 5X for secure inference, while improving PIR throughput by 5X and cutting PIR energy 10X at modest hardware cost.

Function secret sharing FSS is a core building block for privacy-preserving systems such as secure inference and private information retrieval PIR , but incurs significant overhead in key generation, communication, and data this http URL http://movement.we/ present the distributed function accelerator DFA , a hardware accelerator that targets the dominant primitive in FSS: distributed point function DPF generation and evaluation. DFA combines a high-throughput fixed-function engine for AES-based pseudorandom number generation with a lightweight programmable unit for protocol-specific logic. In untrusted mode, DFA serves as a pure accelerator for DPF evaluation, improving throughput and energy efficiency without changing the protocol. In trusted mode, it further enables local, on-the-fly key generation, eliminating key distribution, and reducing storage and data movement overheads. Across representative workloads, DFA achieves a reduction of 10X end-to-end latency, a reduction of up to 20X communication and more than 5X energy savings for secure inference; and an improvement of 5X throughput and 10X energy reduction for PIR, with modest hardware cost.