Salt Lake City, 15th October 2024 — The FHE Technical Consortium for Hardware (FHETCH) has officially launched, aiming to advance interoperability between Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) hardware and software for practical, real-world applications. Founded by Optalysys, Chain Reaction and Niobium, the consortium will bring together FHE software developers, hardware manufacturers, and cloud providers to accelerate the development of commercially viable FHE solutions.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an advanced, quantum-secure cryptography method that allows encrypted data to be processed without ever needing to be decrypted. It allows organisations to process data while maintaining privacy, opening up opportunities for secure data collaboration across industries, even in untrusted environments. FHE has potential applications such as medical data analysis, financial transactions, private cloud computing, machine learning and confidential transactions and communications.
FHETCH is committed to closing the performance gap between current FHE solutions and the demands of practical, commercial deployment. The consortium will focus on developing FHE hardware acceleration technologies, creating open technical standards that ensure FHE systems align with global regulatory frameworks and integrate seamlessly with existing data centre formats and FHE software libraries. These efforts will drive the commercial viability of
FHE, lower adoption barriers and expand its application across industries.
As its inaugural project, FHETCH will develop an API abstraction layer enabling any FHE hardware accelerator to interface with any FHE library. The project aims to increase the flexibility of FHE deployments, simplify application development, and accelerate the development of new hardware and software solutions.
Joseph Wilson, Head of Strategic Innovation at Optalysys says: “FHE has long been recognised for its transformative potential but until now, the challenge has been turning that potential into real-world scalable solutions. It’s time to bridge the gap between theoretical potential and practical deployment. FHETCH is committed to driving real-world adoption by bringing together the necessary players to make secure computation a reality for all.”
Oren Yokev, Co-founder and CTO of Chain Reaction says: “Cross-industry collaboration is essential for enabling the widespread deployment of THE. FHETCH will advance a unified framework that will allow us to innovate faster and more effectively, laying the foundation for a secure digital future.”
Jorge Myszne, CPO of Niobium comments: “The regulatory landscape is growing more complex. FHETCH will give the industry a shared foundation, enabling the rapid development of badly needed FHE solutions that will mathematically guarantee privacy and compliance long-term.”
About FHETCH
About FHETCH (FHE Technical Consortium for Hardware) The FHE Technical Consortium for Hardware (FHETCH) is an industry-led international consortium dedicated to advancing the commercial availability of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology through collaboration among hardware and software developers, application
owners and end-users. FHETCH aims to accelerate the development and deployment of interoperable FHE solutions by fostering innovation in FHE hardware acceleration, defining practical and commercially viable performance benchmarks, and developing open APIs and standards that ensure seamless integration across diverse platforms. By bringing together leaders in the field, FHETCH is committed to creating a secure and scalable future for privacy-preserving computations, safeguarding data in a wide range of applications from healthcare to finance.
FHETCH is actively seeking additional members, and it is open to all organisations developing hardware solutions for FHE. Current and potential FHE application developers, cloud providers, and end users are also invited to engage with FHETCH.
