SHIELD: Scalable Homomorphic Implementation of Encrypted Data-Classifiers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Homomorphic encryption (HE) systems enable computations on encrypted data, without decrypting and without knowledge of the secret key. In this work, we describe an optimized Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) based implementation of a variant of the HE system recently proposed by Gentry, Sahai and Waters (GSW). Although this system was widely believed to be less efficient than its contemporaries, we demonstrate quite the opposite behavior for a large class of applications. We first highlight and carefully exploit the algebraic features of the system to achieve significant speedup over the state-of-the-art HE implementation, namely the IBM homomorphic encryption library (HElib). We introduce several optimizations on top of our HE implementation, and use the resulting scheme to construct a homomorphic Bayesian spam filter, secure multiple keyword search, and a homomorphic evaluator for binary decision trees. Our results show a factor of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> improvement in performance (under the same security settings and CPU platforms) compared to IBM HElib for these applications. Our system is built to be easily portable to GPUs (unlike IBM HElib) which results in an additional speedup of up to a factor of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$103.5\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> to offer an overall speedup of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX"> $1{,}035\times$</tex-math> </inline-formula> .
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it