Fully-Homomorphic Encryption Benchmarking and Beyond

Abstract.  Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) has reached the point where real applications can be deployed, yet choosing among implementations, libraries, compilers and hardware platforms remains difficult without comparable end-to-end performance data.  This talk presents the FHE Benchmarking Suite, a community effort developed under HomomorphicEncryption.org and launched in March 2026 at fhe-benchmarking.org.  In this talk, we describe the design choices behind the suite: a common harness drives a seven-stage, two-party non-interactive protocol and measures time, bandwidth, storage, precision and cost at each stage, and is agnostic to how a submission is built or where it runs.  We then review the six published workloads, ranging from encrypted vector search and exact integer arithmetic to transciphering and machine-learning inference, and the lessons from the first submissions.  We close with trends observed across the open FHE ecosystem, open problems for standardization, and a call for contributions.

Join work: Andreea Alexandru, Flavio Bergamaschi, Shruthi Gorantala, Shai Halevi

Suggested readings:

• FHE Benchmarking Suite (website and repository)