Like many aspects of cybersecurity, data security is a never-ending cat-and-mouse game between those trying to maintain continuous protection of data and those trying to gain unauthorized access for malicious purposes. Fortunately, tools are available that close data security gaps and make end-to-end protection across the data lifecycle a reality – eliminating blindspots and points of vulnerability for cyber defenders.

As discussed in our last blog, the promise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is only now becoming a reality, thanks to DataKrypto’s innovative approach. Traditional FHE lacks the performance required to make the technology viable for widespread adoption. DataKrypto’s fully optimized FHE is changing that.

But that’s not the end of the story. Hardware accelerators, also known as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), have emerged as the way to overcome the limitations and bottlenecks of traditional FHE. These accelerators are great for providing a new revenue stream for the vendors offering them, but they’re not great for you. At the end of the day, an accelerator approach tries to inject speed and performance into software that’s inherently slow. Our advice on hardware accelerators? Don’t bother. FHE accelerators are already obsolete.

Strapping a jet engine to a snail is like putting lipstick on a pig

Hardware accelerators are specialized components designed to speed up the computationally intensive processes plaguing many of today’s FHE solutions. Vendors promise these accelerators make the technology more practical for real-world applications and widespread adoption. This misguided endeavor ignores the fundamental inefficiencies and slow performance of FHE and is a classic case of throwing hardware at a software problem. This approach fails to solve the underlying performance issues and introduces new complexities in system design and resource allocation. Accelerators will boost speeds, but at what cost? They need their own provisioning and maintenance, creating additional bottlenecks. Let’s drill deeper into their setbacks.

Increases Costs:

Purchasing additional hardware to make software perform better is an added expense. Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or FHE-specific accelerators, make FHE a more significant investment, whereas with fully optimized FHE, your only investment is in the technology itself. Also, companies will need to purchase one ASIC for every central processing unit (CPU), which can get even more costly for enterprise-scale deployments.

Limited Flexibility:

Accelerators, especially ASICs, aren’t built for change. But as the threat landscape continues to evolve, FHE algorithms are updated continuously to maintain data security. Such algorithm changes mean that accelerators can struggle to keep up and quickly become obsolete.

Integration Complexity:

Integrating accelerators with existing systems is tricky. They must integrate with FHE software and with the various systems that FHE connects to, often requiring major software changes. This integration complexity adds more cost to the hardware and results in longer deployment times and a slower time to value.

Performance Bottlenecks:

While they’re intended to speed up traditional FHE, the opposite can be true. Hardware accelerators can create data transfer slowdowns between the CPU and memory, offsetting the desired performance gains by additional hops that data must traverse.

Scalability Limitations:

Scaling up accelerators is costly and resource-heavy, making it impractical for some organizations. One way to achieve scalability is through high-performance field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which add even more cost and can be hard to attain during supply chain hiccups.

Fully optimized FHE renders accelerators obsolete

As noted earlier, the market for FHE accelerators arose from the genuine need to make FHE fast enough to realize its potential. However, if given the option, most security practitioners would choose a sleek, streamlined solution from a single vendor over a cumbersome, patched-together install from multiple vendors–even more so if that sleek solution outperforms the clunky one.

Luckily, there is a highly performant FHE solution that in and of itself is faster than any other FHE solution on the market, boosted or not.

DataKrypto is at the forefront of FHE innovation, leveraging symmetric encryption to overcome the pitfalls inherent in competitive products. We offer the first and only high-speed FHE solution to fulfill the promise of continuous encryption at near plaintext speeds and at scale. What do we mean by “near plain-text speeds”? Our FHE adds nothing to computation times for integers up to 64 bits, significantly outperforming traditional FHE solutions that can introduce delays of several milliseconds or more, thus providing a more efficient option for secure data processing. Even with accelerators, other FHE solutions on the market will still only achieve speeds of between 100x to 1000x plain-text speed, which is not ideal for real-time applications. Sure, they narrow the gap, but why introduce the complexity of FHE acceleration if it’s not needed? Our FHE offering makes continuous encryption a practical, achievable goal for the first time through a number of important breakthroughs:

Blazing Speed:

DataKrypto’s FHE is ideal for real-time applications, operating at virtually the same speed as plaintext. We’re talking nanoseconds, not hours or days, as with other FHE solutions. Imagine what a difference that can make!

No Data Expansion:

Traditional FHE notoriously inflates the data size, but DataKrypto does not. Instead, we ensure smooth, efficient processing and save you from extra storage and bandwidth costs.

Industry-Certified Security:

DataKrypto is the only FIPS 140-2-certified FHE solution, giving you additional peace of mind and assurance that our solution meets the highest security standards.

Widespread adoption of FHE is finally possible. We broke the code to deliver the first viable, performant FHE solution that will make today’s costly information security problems a problem of the past.

Ready to join us on the journey to continuous encryption? Contact us today to learn more about how DataKrypto can help you achieve continuous encryption and close your data security gaps.