Private information retrieval (PIR) is an essential cryptographic protocol for privacy-preserving applications, enabling a client to retrieve a record from a server's database without revealing which record was requested. Single-server PIR based on homomorphic encryption has particularly gained immense attention for its ease of deployment and reduced trust assumptions. However, single-server PIR remains impractical due to its high computational and memory bandwidth demands. Specifically, reading the entirety of large databases from storage, such as SSDs, severely limits its performance. To address this, we propose IVE, an accelerator for single-server PIR with a systematic extension that enables practical retrieval from large databases using DRAM. Recent advances in DRAM capacity allow PIR for large databases to be served entirely from DRAM, removing its dependence on storage bandwidth. Although the memory bandwidth bottleneck still remains, multi-client batching effectively amortizes database access costs across concurrent requests to improve throughput. However, client-specific data remains a bottleneck, whose bandwidth requirements ultimately limits performance. IVE overcomes this by employing a large on-chip scratchpad with an operation scheduling algorithm that maximizes data reuse, further boosting throughput. Additionally, we introduce sysNTTU, a versatile functional unit that enhances area efficiency without sacrificing performance. We also propose a heterogeneous memory system architecture, which enables a linear scaling of database sizes without a throughput degradation. Consequently, IVE achieves up to$1,275 \times$higher throughput compared to prior PIR hardware solutions.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables secure computation on encrypted data, mitigating privacy concerns in cloud and edge environments. However, due to its high compute and memory demands, extensive acceleration research has been pursued across diverse hardware platforms, especially GPUs. In this paper, we perform a microarchitectural analysis of CKKS, a popular FHE scheme, on modern GPUs. Focusing on the memory hierarchy, we demonstrate that dominant kernels remain bound by the on-chip L2 cache despite its high bandwidth, exposing a persistent inner memory wall beyond the conventional off-chip DRAM bottleneck. Further, we reveal that the overall CKKS throughput is constrained by low per-kernel hardware utilization, caused by insufficient intra-kernel parallelism. Motivated by these findings, we introduce Theodosian, a set of complementary, memory-aware optimizations that improve cache efficiency and reduce runtime overheads. Theodosian achieves $\mathbf{1. 4 5}-\mathbf{1. 8 3} \times$ performance improvements over a highly optimized baseline, Cheddar, across representative CKKS workloads. On an RTX 5090, we reduce the bootstrapping latency for 32,768 complex numbers from 22.1 ms to 15.2 ms, and further to 12.8 ms with additional algorithmic optimizations, establishing a new state-of-the-art GPU performance to the best of our knowledge.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a promising cryptographic primitive for realizing private neural network inference (PI) services by allowing a client to fully offload the inference task to a cloud server while keeping the client data oblivious to the server. This work proposes NeuJeans, an FHE-based solution for the PI of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). NeuJeans tackles the critical problem of the enormous computational cost for the FHE evaluation of CNNs. We introduce a novel encoding method called Coefficients-in-Slot (CinS) encoding, which enables multiple convolutions in one HE multiplication without costly slot permutations. We further observe that CinS encoding is obtained by conducting the first several steps of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) on a ciphertext in conventional Slot encoding. This property enables us to save the conversion between CinS and Slot encodings as bootstrapping a ciphertext starts with DFT. Exploiting this, we devise optimized execution flows for various two-dimensional convolution (conv2d) operations and apply them to end-to-end CNN implementations. NeuJeans accelerates the performance of conv2d-activation sequences by up to 5.68× compared to state-of-the-art FHE-based PI work and performs the PI of a CNN at the scale of ImageNet within a mere few seconds.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an emerging cryptographic technology that guarantees the privacy of sensitive user data by enabling direct computations on encrypted data. Despite the security benefits of this approach, FHE is associated with prohibitively high levels of computational and memory overhead, preventing its widespread use in real-world services. Numerous domain-specific hardware designs have been proposed to address this issue, but most of them use excessive amounts of chip area and power, leaving room for further improvements in terms of practicality.