Intel Homomorphic Encryption Toolkit

Intel Homomorphic Encryption (HE) Toolkit is Intel's primary platform for delivering innovation around HE with the aim of providing both the community and industry with an intuitive entry point for Experimentation, Development and Deployment of HE applications. Intel HE Toolkit currently offers sample kernels and example programs that demonstrate varying operations and applications that can be built leveraging three major HE libraries Microsoft SEAL, PALISADE, and HElib. Moreover, Intel HE Toolkit demonstrates the advantages of using Intel® Processors through libraries such as the Intel HE Acceleration Library to utilize the latest Intel hardware features.

Contents

• Intel Homomorphic Encryption Toolkit
  • Contents
  • Quick Start
  • Dependencies
  • Setup
  • The hekit command
  • Docker build (Recommended)
  • System build
  • Kernels
  • Sample kernels
  • Test sample kernels
  • Examples
  • Secure Query
  • Logistic Regression
  • Private Set Intersection
  • New Examples
  • Known Issues
• Third Party Plugins
• Contributing
  • Adding a New Command
  • Troubleshooting
• Contributors

Quick Start

Want to get up and running quickly with Intel HE toolkit? Then follow our Quick Start guide.

Dependencies

Intel HE toolkit has been tested on Ubuntu 22.04

Must have system dependencies for the toolkit include,

python >= 3.10
pip
git

Further Python dependencies include,

toml
argcomplete (optional: tab completion)
docker      (optional: building docker containers)
pytest      (optional: running tests)
pytest-mock (optional: running tests)

For faster setup, a requirements.txt file is provided for recommended user python dependencies and a dev_reqs.txt is provided for all python dependencies listed above and pre-commit tools for development. Either file can install dependencies with

pip install -r <requirements-file>

However, to build anything useful with the toolkit, we recommend to additionally install the following system dependencies,

m4
patchelf
cmake >= 3.22
g++ == 11.x or clang == 14.x
pthread
virtualenv (optional if building the Logistic Regression Example)
autoconf   (optional if using PALISADE)
gmp == 1.5.x  (optional if using HElib)

Setup

To set up the toolkit users must first initialize the hekit command using

git clone https://github.com/intel/he-toolkit.git
cd he-toolkit
./hekit init --default-config

This will create a directory ~/.hekit in the user's home directory and create the default.config, or other user specified config file to this location. This directory will be where all components built and installed by hekit will be kept.

Moreover, the hekit command will be added to the user's PATH so as to enable the user to call the command from anywhere on their system. This modifies your shell's initialization script (currently only in bash).

Intel HE toolkit is primarily accessible through the hekit command. There are currently two ways of interacting with the toolkit: through a Docker build or directly on your system.

The hekit command

The hekit command is a command-line tool that can be used by the user to easily set up an HE environment in a configurable and intuitive manner.

The hekit command has a help option which lists all subcommands and flags

hekit -h

Moreover, each subcommand has a help option that can be invoked with `hekit