HEIR: Homomorphic Encryption Intermediate Representation

What is HEIR?

HEIR is a compiler toolchain for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). We aim to standardize a set of intermediate representations related to FHE, which compiler engineers, hardware designers, and cryptography researchers can build upon to accelerate the research and development of production-strength privacy-first software systems.

HEIR is built in the MLIR framework.

For an overview of the project’s goals, see our talk at FHE.org.

Project Goals

• Provide MLIR dialects for all modern FHE schemes.
• Design MLIR dialects that appropriately abstract across the many flavors of related schemes.
• Design lower-level dialects for optimizing underlying abstract-algebraic operations (e.g., modular polynomial arithmetic).
• Provide hardware accelerator designers an easy path to integrate, so that a wide variety of FHE programs, optimizations, and parameter choices can be compared across accelerators.
• Provide a platform for research into novel FHE optimizations.
• Provide a platform for benchmarking.
• Provide integrations with multiple front-end languages, such as ClangIR and TensorFlow.

Partners

TODO(b/287634511): add list of partner companies and universities

The HEIR codebase and documentation are maintained by Google.