FHE on blockchain

This page gives an overview of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and its implementation on the blockchain by fhEVM. It provides the essential architectural concepts needed to start building with fhEVM.

FHE overview

FHE is an advanced cryptographic technique that allows computations to be performed directly on encrypted data, without the need for decryption. This ensures that data remains confidential throughout its entire lifecycle, even during processing.

With FHE:

• Sensitive data can be securely encrypted while still being useful for computations.

• The results of computations are encrypted, maintaining end-to-end privacy.

FHE operates using three types of keys, each playing a crucial role in its functionality:

Private key

• Purpose: - for securely decrypting results - Decrypts ciphertexts to recover the original plaintext.

• Usage in fhEVM: Managed securely by the Key Management System (KMS) using a threshold MPC protocol. This ensures no single entity ever possesses the full private key.

Public key

• Purpose: - for encrypting data. - Encrypts plaintexts into ciphertexts.

• Usage in fhEVM: Shared globally to allow users and smart contracts to encrypt inputs or states. It ensures that encrypted data can be processed without revealing the underlying information.

Evaluation key

• Purpose: - for performing encrypted computations - Enables efficient homomorphic operations (e.g., addition, multiplication) on ciphertexts.

• Usage in fhEVM: Provided to FHE nodes (on-chain validators or off-chain coprocessors) to perform computations on encrypted data while preserving confidentiality.

These three keys work together to facilitate private and secure computations, forming the foundation of FHE-based systems like fhEVM.

Overview of FHE Keys and their roles

FHE to Blockchain: From library to fhEVM

Building on Zama's FHE library

At its core, the fhEVM is built on Zama's high-performance FHE library, TFHE-rs, written in Rust. This library implements the TFHE (Torus Fully Homomorphic Encryption) scheme and is designed to perform secure computations on encrypted data efficiently.

Info: For detailed documentation and implementation examples on the tfhe-rs library, visit the TFHE-rs documentation.

However, integrating a standalone FHE library like TFHE-rs into a blockchain environment involves unique challenges. Blockchain systems demand efficient processing, public verifiability, and seamless interoperability, all while preserving their decentralized nature. To address these requirements, Zama designed the fhEVM, a system that bridges the computational power of TFHE-rs with the transparency and scalability of blockchain technology.

Challenges in blockchain integration

Integrating FHE into blockchain systems posed several challenges that needed to be addressed to achieve the goals of confidentiality, composability, and scalability:

1. Transparency and privacy: Blockchains are inherently transparent, where all on-chain data is publicly visible. FHE solves this by keeping all sensitive data encrypted, ensuring privacy without sacrificing usability.

2. Public verifiability: On-chain computations need to be verifiable by all participants. This required a mechanism to confirm the correctness of encrypted computations without revealing their inputs or outputs.

3. Composability: Smart contracts needed to interact seamlessly with each other, even when operating on encrypted data.

4. Performance and scalability: FHE computations are resource-intensive, and blockchain systems require high throughput to remain practical.

To overcome these challenges, Zama introduced a hybrid architecture for fhEVM that combines:

• On-chain functionality for managing state and enforcing access controls.

• Off-chain processing via a coprocessor to execute resource-intensive FHE computations.