Intel's Heracles chip speeds up encrypted data processing by up to 5000 times.
Worried that your latest ask to a cloud-based AI reveals a bit too much about you? Want to know your genetic risk of disease without revealing it to the services that compute the answer?
There is a way to do computing on encrypted data without ever having it decrypted. It’s called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. But there’s a rather large catch. It can take thousands—even tens of thousands—of times longer to compute on today’s CPUs and GPUs than simply working with the decrypted data.
So universities, startups, and at least one processor giant have been working on specialized chips that could close that gap. Last month at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, Intel demonstrated its answer, Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU.
Startups are racing to beat Intel and each other to commercialization. But Sanu Mathew, who leads security circuits research at Intel, believes the CPU giant has a big lead, because its chip can do more computing than any other FHE accelerator yet built. “Heracles is the first hardware that works at scale,” he says.
The scale is measurable both physically and in compute performance. While other FHE research chips have been in the range of 10 square millimeters or less, Heracles is about 20 times that size and is built using Intel’s most advanced, 3-nanometer FinFET technology. And it’s flanked inside a liquid-cooled package by two 24-gigabyte high-bandwidth memory chips—a configuration usually seen only in GPUs for training AI.
In terms of scaling compute performance, Heracles showed muscle in live demonstrations at ISSCC. At its heart the demo was a simple private query to a secure server. It simulated a request by a voter to make sure that her ballot had been registered correctly. The state, in this case, has an encrypted database of voters and their votes. To maintain her privacy, the voter would not want to have her ballot information decrypted at any point; so using FHE, she encrypts her ID and vote and sends it to the government database. There, without decrypting it, the system determines if it is a match and returns an encrypted answer, which she then decrypts on her side.
On an Intel Xeon server CPU, the process took 15 milliseconds. Heracles did it in 14 microseconds. While that difference isn’t something a single human would notice, verifying 100 million voter ballots adds up to more than 17 days of CPU work versus a mere 23 minutes on Heracles.
Looking back on the five-year journey to bring the Heracles chip to life, Ro Cammarota, who led the project at Intel until last December and is now at University of California Irvine, says “we have proven and delivered everything that we promised.”
FHE Data Expansion
FHE is fundamentally a mathematical transformation, sort of like the Fourier transform. It encrypts data using a quantum-computer-proof algorithm, but, crucially, uses corollaries to the mathematical operations usually used on unencrypted data. These corollaries achieve the same ends on the encrypted data.
One of the main things holding such secure computing back is the explosion in the size of the data once it’s encrypted for FHE, Anupam Golder, a research scientist at Intel’s circuits research lab, told engineers at ISSCC. “Usually, the size of cipher text is the same as the size of plain text, but for FHE it’s orders of magnitude larger,” he said.
While the sheer volume is a big problem, the kinds of computing you need to do with that data is also an issue. FHE is all about very large numbers that must be computed with precision. While a CPU can do that, it’s very slow going—integer addition and multiplication take about 10,000 more clock cycles in FHE. Worse still, CPUs aren’t built to do such computing in parallel. Although GPUs excel at parallel operations, precision is not their strong suit. (In fact, from generation to generation, GPU designers have devoted more and more of the chip’s resources to computing less and less-precise numbers.)
FHE also requires some oddball operations with names like “twiddling” and “automorphism,” and it relies on a compute-intensive noise-cancelling process called bootstrapping. None of these things are efficient on a general-purpose processor. So, while clever algorithms and libraries of software cheats have been developed over the years, the need for a hardware accelerator remains if FHE is going to tackle large-scale problems, says Cammarota.
The Labors of Heracles
Heracles was initiated under a DARPA program five years ago to accelerate FHE using purpose-built hardware. It was developed as “a whole system-level effort that went all the way from theory and algorithms down to the circuit design,” says Cammarota.
Among the first problems was how to compute with numbers that were larger than even the 64-bit words that are today a CPU’s most precise. There are ways to break up these gigantic numbers into chunks of bits that can be calculated independently of each other, providing a degree of parallelism. Early on, the Intel team made a big bet that they would be able to make this work in smaller, 32-bit chunks, yet still maintain the needed precision. This decision gave the Heracles architecture some speed and parallelism, because the 32-bit arithmetic circuits are considerably smaller than 64-bit ones, explains Cammarota.
At Heracles’ heart are 64 compute cores—called tile-pairs—arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. These are what are called single instruction multiple data (SIMD) compute engines designed to do the polynomial math, twiddling, and other things that make up computing in FHE and to do them in parallel. An on-chip 2D mesh network connects the tiles to each other with wide, 512 byte, buses.
Important to making encrypted computing efficient is feeding those huge numbers to the compute cores quickly. The sheer amount of data involved meant linking 48-GB-worth of expensive high-bandwidth memory to the processor with 819 GB per second connections. Once on the chip, data musters in 64 megabytes of cache memory—somewhat more than an Nvidia Hopper-generation GPU. From there it can flow through the array at 9.6 terabytes per second by hopping from tile-pair to tile-pair.
To ensure that computing and moving data don’t get in each other’s way, Heracles runs three synchronized streams of instructions simultaneously, one for moving data onto and off of the processor, one for moving data within it, and a third for doing the math, Golder explained.
It all adds up to some massive speed ups, according to Intel. Heracles—operating at 1.2 gigahertz—takes just 39 microseconds to do FHE’s critical math transformation, a 2,355-fold improvement over an Intel Xeon CPU running at 3.5 GHz. Across seven key operations, Heracles was 1,074 to 5,547 times as fast.
The differing ranges have to do with how much data movement is involved in the operations, explains Mathew. “It’s all about balancing the movement of data with the crunching of numbers,” he says.
FHE Competition
“It’s very good work,” Kurt Rohloff, chief technology officer at FHE software firm Duality Technology, says of the Heracles results. Duality was part of a team that developed a competing accelerator design under the same DARPA program that Intel conceived Heracles under. “When Intel starts talking about scale, that usually carries quite a bit of weight.”
Duality’s focus is less on new hardware than on software products that do the kind of encrypted queries that Intel demonstrated at ISSCC. At the scale in use today “there’s less of a need for [specialized] hardware,” says Rohloff. “Where you start to need hardware is emerging applications around deeper machine-learning oriented operations like neural net, LLMs, or semantic search.”
Last year, Duality demonstrated an FHE-encrypted language model called BERT. Like more famous LLMs such as ChatGPT, BERT is a transformer model. However it’s only one tenth the size of even the most compact LLMs.
John Barrus, vice president of product at Dayton, Ohio-based Niobium Microsystems, an FHE chip startup spun out of another DARPA competitor, agrees that encrypted AI is a key target of FHE chips. “There are a lot of smaller models that, even with FHE’s data expansion, will run just fine on accelerated hardware,” he says.
With no stated commercial plans from Intel, Niobium expects its chip to be “the world’s first commercially viable FHE accelerator, designed to enable encrypted computations at speeds practical for real-world cloud and AI infrastructure.” Although it hasn’t announced when a commercial chip will be available, last month the startup revealed that it had inked a deal worth 10 billion South Korean won (US $6.9 million) with Seoul-based chip design firm Semifive to develop the FHE accelerator for fabrication using Samsung Foundry’s 8-nanometer process technology.
Other startups including Fabric Cryptography, Cornami, and Optalysys have been working on chips to accelerate FHE. Optalysys CEO Nick New says Heracles hits about the level of speedup you could hope for using an all-digital system. “We’re looking at pushing way past that digital limit,” he says. His company’s approach is to use the physics of a photonic chip to do FHE’s compute-intensive transform steps. That photonics chip is on its seventh generation, he says, and among the next steps is to 3D integrate it with custom silicon to do the non-transform steps and coordinate the whole process. A full 3D-stacked commercial chip could be ready in two or three years, says New.
While competitors develop their chips, so will Intel, says Mathew. It will be improving on how much the chip can accelerate computations by fine tuning the software. It will also be trying out more massive FHE problems, and exploring hardware improvements for a potential next generation. “This is like the first microprocessor… the start of a whole journey,” says Mathew.
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Comments
By freedomben 2026-03-1014:2715 reply Perhaps it's a cynical way to look at it, but in the days of the war on general purpose computing, and locked-down devices, I have to consider the news in terms of how it could be used against the users and device owners. I don't know enough to provide useful analysis so I won't try, but instead pose as questions to the much smarter people who might have some interesting thoughts to share.
There are two, non-exclusive paths I'm thinking at the moment:
1. DRM: Might this enable a next level of DRM?
2. Hardware attestation: Might this enable a deeper level of hardware attestation?
Just to level set here. I think its important to realize this is really focused on allowing things like search to operate on encrypted data. This technique allows you to perform an operation on the data without decrypting it. Think a row in a database with email, first, last, and mailing address. You want to search by email to retrieve the other data, but don't want that data unencrypted since it is PII.
In general, this solution would be expensive and targeted at data lakes, or areas where you want to run computation but not necessarily expose the data.
With regard to DRM, one key thing to remember is that it has to be cheap, and widely deployable. Part of the reason dvds were easily broken is that the algorithm chosen was inexpensive both computationally, so you can install it on as many clients as possible.
DVD players also didn't have a great key revocation and forced field updates of keys and software and such. Blu Ray did, and was somewhat more effective. I also imagine console manufacturers have far more control over the supply chain at large.
Consoles after the original Xbox (which had an epic piracy ecosystem) all had online integration. The Xbox 360 had a massive piracy scene, but it was 100% offline only. The Xbox One has had no such breaches that I am aware of.
RE: BOM - famously, with many of these examples, certain specific disc drives or mainboards were far more compromised than others.
By Crosseye_Jack 2026-03-116:08 > The Xbox 360 had a massive piracy scene, but it was 100% offline only.
You could play pirated games online with the 360. The piracy was at the DVD Rom firmware level, replacing the stock firmware with one that basically changed the book type of the media. (And in later versions also mimicked other security checks preformed by the console to validate the authenticity of the disk)
However the DVD firmware mod didn’t break any digital signatures. It just allowed signed code to be executed from unauthentic media, so it only allowed piracy/backups not a full jailbreak allowing unsigned code. That was more the jtag/reset glitch era. Which was more “offline only” as it was easier for MS to detect and ban your key vault from Xbox live, but because people were willing to pay for modded lobbies in games like Call of Duty (which allowed you to rank up much faster) and Xbox dying if you sneezed that them, there was a even a market for extracting the keys from dead consoles to sell to those selling modded lobbies.
You still ran a risk of getting your console hardware banned for doing the DVD firmware mod, but towards the end I believe MS threw in the towel (even after trying to embed the flash chip in the samr package as the DSP for the drive which resulted in the kamikaze hack before the drive got further exploited) because one method they tried to use to detect piracy had such tight tolerances that it caused legit customers with aging drives to be caught up in the ban wave and MS had to walk it back.
The head of Xbox security (who sadly is no longer with us, he was a good egg at heart) left Microsoft not long afterwards. Obviously stating he wanted to move on to other things, but the word around the community at the time was that he was shown the door.
Personally I don’t hold much to that story (of him being pushed), this was so late in the consoles life that it seemed like it was trying to patch the hole in the titanic after it already sunk.
By gpapilion 2026-03-115:13 Home networks have made this much easier. DVD players didn’t expect network access for software updates etc…
By jasomill 2026-03-111:50 This is an exceptionally good point. For example, I suspect two major reasons DRM has been more successful on game consoles than video players are the much smaller ecosystems and much larger BOMs, not necessarily in that order.
By jackyinger 2026-03-115:07 How is searching encrypted data not going to be used for exfiltration? What a terrible idea.
I’m sure you can name benign useful things you could use it for. But it seems to me you’re blatantly overlooking the obvious flaw.
There is no getting around doing search on encrypted data reducing the level of secrecy. To have an even minutely useful search result, some information within the searched corpus must be exposed.
> how it could be used against the users and device owners
Same here.
Can't wait to KYC myself in order to use a CPU.
By observationist 2026-03-1018:352 reply KYC = Kill Your Conscience
It's truly amazing how modern people just blithely sacrifice their privacy and integrity for no good reason. Just to let big tech corporations more efficiently siphon money out of the market. And then they fight you passionately when you call out those companies for being unnecessarily invasive and intrusive.
The four horsemen of the infocalypse are such profoundly reliable boogeymen, we really need a huge psychological study across all modern cultures to see why they're so effective at dismantling rational thought in the general public, and how we can innoculate society against it without damaging other important social behaviors.
They probably meant "know your customer", you know, where you have to submit to an anal probe to think about getting a bank account and withdrawing more than $8 of cash at a time will trigger a suspicious activity report for money laundering/tax evasion while the Epstein class are getting away with the most heinous crimes possible.
By jasomill 2026-03-111:54 I'm still waiting for the first password manager to incorporate biometrics and security questions, as predicted decades ago by Douglas Adams:
There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant-a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
By direwolf20 2026-03-114:00 The saying is "every accusation is a confession". If the political class claims to be preventing us from doing something that we obviously are not doing, we should assume they're doing that thing until proven otherwise.
By cmeacham98 2026-03-1022:081 reply KYC is generally a force for good because it prevents fraud. While it is not reasonable for Discord to collect your identity that is a fair requirement for a bank account because money laundering is a serious problem worth preventing.
The reason the 'Epstein class' are able to get away with crimes is because in recent US elections the US voted to elect politicions that intentionally are not investigating those crimes and even pardoned some criminals convicted of them.
Don’t pardoned people by definition need to have been convicted of a crime whether real or in some select instances otherwise? Can you pardon someone not convicted of a (federal) crime?
By monocasa 2026-03-113:24 Not according to Ex parte Garland (1866).
> 9. The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
Basically you can't pardon acts that haven't happened yet, but you can pardon before any legal action has been taken on prior acts.
By jandrese 2026-03-1023:38 Preemptive pardons have been used in recent history.
https://www.criminallawlibraryblog.com/amp/preemptive-pardon...
By heavyset_go 2026-03-1022:231 reply Yes, the last president pardoned himself and his family on his way out.
By mc32 2026-03-111:39 I’m not sure if that has precedent. It’s unusual to grant a pardon before a case is brought to court.
In any event, my point was all presidents who grant pardons grant them to people convicted of a crime; it’s not a recent development. But that was framed as being upsetting precedent.
By xeonmc 2026-03-1018:56
> how it could be used against the users
We are not anymore their clients, we are just another product to sell. So, they do not design chips for us but for the benefit of other corporations.
3. Unskippable ads with data gathering at the CPU level.
By dimitrios1 2026-03-1015:283 reply I distinctly remember from university in one of my more senior classes designing logic gates, chaining together ands, nands, ors, nors, xors, and then working our way up to numerical processors, ALUs, and eventually latches, RAM, and CPUs. The capstone was creating an assembly to control it all.
I remember how thinking how fun it was! I could see unfolded before me how there would be endless ways to configure, reconfigure, optimize, etc.
I know there are a few open source chip efforts, but wondering maybe now is the time to pull the community together and organize more intentionally around that. Maybe open source chipsets won't be as fast as their corporate counterparts, but I think we are definitely at an inflection point now in society where we would need this to maintain freedom.
If anyone is working in that area, I am very interested. I am very green, but still have the old textbooks I could dust off (just don't have the ole college provided mentor graphics -- or I guess siemens now -- design tool anymore).
By linguae 2026-03-1018:30 I was just thinking about this a few days ago, but not just for the CPU (which we have RISC-V and OpenPOWER), but for an entire system, including the GPU, audio, disk controllers, networking, etc. I think a great target would be mid-2000s graphics and networking; I could go back to a 2006 Mac Pro without too much hardship. Having a fully-open equivalent to mid-2000s hardware would be a boon for open computing.
By officeplant 2026-03-1016:15 Sounds like you might want to go play with RISC-V, either in hardware or emulation.
By matheusmoreira 2026-03-1019:191 reply There's no point. The big chip makers control all the billion dollar fabs. Governments and corporations can easily dictate terms. We'll lose this battle unless we develop a way to cheaply fabricate chips in a garage.
The future is bleak.
By direwolf20 2026-03-114:02 Make one out of relays and use it to run PGP
By youknownothing 2026-03-1014:441 reply I don't think it's applicable to DRM because you eventually need the decrypted content: DRM is typically used for books, music, video, etc., you can't enjoy an encrypted video.
I think eGovernment is the main use case: not super high traffic (we're not voting every day), but very high privacy expectations.
By freedomben 2026-03-1015:121 reply Yes it must be decrypted eventually, but I've read about systems (I think HDMI does this) where the keys are stored in the end device (like the TV or monitor) that the user can't access. Given that we already have that, I think I agree that this news doesn't change anything, but I wonder if there are clever uses I haven't thought of
By NegativeLatency 2026-03-1015:30 Rent out your spare compute, like seti@home or folding@home, but it’s something someone could repackage and sell as a service.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323743
It's not related to DRM or trusted computing.
What does that even mean?
A: "Intel/AMD is adding instructions to accelerate AES"
B: "Might this enable a next level of DRM? Might this enable a deeper level of hardware attestation?"
A: "wtf are you talking about? It's just instructions to make certain types of computations faster, it has nothing to do with DRM or hardware attestation."
B: "Not yet."
I'm sure in some way it probably helps DRM or hardware attestation to some extent, but not any more than say, 3nm process node helps DRM or hardware attestation by making it faster.
By fc417fc802 2026-03-113:01 If this were similar to SGX (which is what I initially assumed) then "not yet" is a perfectly reasonable position to take. However it's actually homomorphic encryption implemented in hardware thus not relevant to DRM (AFAIK).
That said, the unfortunate reality is that the same constructs that underpin DRM are also required to build a secure system. The only difference is who controls the root of trust. As such the problems with DRM (and hardware ownership more generally) are political as opposed to technical in nature.
By direwolf20 2026-03-114:05 I see the same thing every time there's a new medical thing.
> We discovered a substance that boosts your innate immune system and non-specifically clears out throat infections.
> This will be good for people prone to throat infections.
> Not when it's mandated.
someone else told me they're going to spy on your windows with drones to make sure you're verifying your age to your OS, like what??? I thought we were waking up to oppression but we're just inventing fake oppression to be mad at instead of responding to real oppression.
By majorchord 2026-03-1021:17
By monocasa 2026-03-1022:59 I mean, this would be perfect for the key provisioning portions of widevine or bluray.
By benlivengood 2026-03-1018:121 reply 1. The private key is required to see anything computed under FHE, so DRM is pretty unlikely.
2. No, anyone can run the FHE computations anywhere on any hardware if they have the evaluation key (which would also have to be present in any FHE hardware).
By ddtaylor 2026-03-1019:02 HDCP does some of that already in many of your devices.
By amelius 2026-03-1019:11 I'm also thinking of what happens when quantum computing becomes available.
But when homomorphic encryption becomes efficient, perhaps governments can force companies to apply it (though they would lose their opportunity for backdooring, but E2EE is a thing too so I wouldn't worry too much).
By evolve2k 2026-03-1015:58 My thought is half cynical. As LLM crawlers seek to mop up absolutely everything, companies themselves start to worry more about keeping their own data secret. Maybe this is a reason for shifts like this; as encrypted and other privacy-preserving products become more in demand across the board.
By F7F7F7 2026-03-1020:46 When we are at the point where society feels the need that privacy means encryption at compute ... a product like this (or anything else in the supply chain) is not going to save them.
By mathgradthrow 2026-03-1018:41 No, because of the fundamental limitation of DRM. Content must be delivered as plaintext.
By KoolKat23 2026-03-1017:09 This is quite the opposite, better than we have.
It raises the hurdle for those looking to surveil.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
This is primarily for cloud compute I'd imagine, AI specifically. As it's generally not feasible/possible to run the state of the art models locally. Think GDPR and data sovereignty concerns, many demand privacy and can't use services without it.
By observationist 2026-03-1018:30 Regarding DRM, You could use stream ciphers and other well understood cryptography schemes to use a FHE chip like this to create an effectively tamper-proof and interception proof OS, with the FHE chip supplementing normal processors. You'd basically be setting up e2ee between the streaming server and the display, audio output, or other stream target, and there'd be no way to intercept or inspect unencrypted data without breaking the device. Put in modern tamper detection and you get a very secure setup, with modern performance, and a FHE chip basically just handling keys and encapsulation operations, fairly low compute and bandwidth needs. DRM and attestation both, as well as fairly dystopian manufacturer and corporate controls over devices users should own.
You’re right it’s a cynical take. I don’t get cynicism for the sake of it, detached from technical reality.
No, this does nothing for DRM or HW attestation. The interesting thought is: not everything is a conspiracy. Yes, that’s just what a conspirator would say. But it’s also true.
By coliveira 2026-03-115:23 Not everything is a conspiracy, yes. But when we have a class of conspirators in power, and we do have, everything can be used by the conspiracy.
Regarding DRM I don't see how it'll survive "Camera in front of the screen" + "AI video upscaling" once the second part is good enough. Can't DRM between the screen and your eyes. Until they put DRM in Neuralink.
By RiverCrochet 2026-03-1017:302 reply > Can't DRM between the screen and your eyes.
No, but media can be watermarked in imperceptible ways, and then if all players are required to check and act on such watermarks, the gap becomes narrow enough to probably be effective.
See Cinavia.
By jasomill 2026-03-112:07 Sure, but we already have good enough players, open source even, that don't support this technology, and recent codecs have, if anything, become more open, so this only seems problematic for playback on non-general purpose computing devices like smart TVs, set top boxes, and maybe smartphones, tablets, and battery-powered PCs if the tech is incorporated into hardware decoders for all acceptable codecs.
By fc417fc802 2026-03-113:112 reply > if all players are required
Massive if. Why would I voluntarily purchase gimped hardware?
Cinavia depended on being implemented by the player itself. It's difficult to see how (for example) a smart tv could implement it for streams coming in via HDMI from a computer the user has full control of.
By RiverCrochet 2026-03-1117:301 reply Macrovision is a crude DRM scheme that was required by law to exist in all VCRs towards the end of their time in the 90s. Requiring TVs to check for and only display video for streams that present a certificate through such an embedded data stream could simply be called "Macrovision Next Generation Content Assurance."
By fc417fc802 2026-03-1119:38 Sure, setting aside notions of common sense and accountability to the public a western government could hypothetically impose the equivalent (inverse?) of the EURion constellation on all digital displays. Of course you'd also need to patch the hole of authorized devices (ex laptops) running FOSS video players playing back pirated streams. Which is to say that it doesn't actually solve the "problem" unless it turns into a full blown war on general purpose computing.
But wait! Even that's not good enough because my (now illicit) pirate box can present the stream embedded in a webpage for the locked down device that I don't control to play back on the DRM'd TV. So I guess now we're also going to want a scheme to prevent government approved devices from establishing network connections with unapproved ones?
By direwolf20 2026-03-114:071 reply You would purchase a Blu-ray player in order to play Blu-rays, pretty simple. They have this watermarking.
By fc417fc802 2026-03-115:481 reply Right. To play legally purchased blu-rays. Who pirates movies and then burns them on a disk? And if someone did do that why would they be using a gimped blu-ray player instead of a media PC?
The only thing this scheme was ever going to catch was full blown counterfeit disks sold on a street corner to your average joe. I think that was only ever much of a thing in the developing world. Or was it just before my time?
By direwolf20 2026-03-1115:021 reply The idea would be that when you see a recording of a Blu-ray, you can track down who bought the Blu-ray. However that part was never implemented. However it WAS implemented on Netflix which is why pirates don't like using Netflix as a source. Any time a pirated movie is released from a Netflix source, that person gets blacklisted from Netflix because it's watermarked with their user ID.
By fc417fc802 2026-03-1117:54 Really? I see no mention of that for Cinava and don't see how that could have worked in practical terms.
I'm aware of what Netflix and other streaming services do. That actually makes sense.
By zvqcMMV6Zcr 2026-03-1014:114 reply > Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU.
That is nice speed-up compared to generic hardware but everyone probably wants to know how much slower it is than performing same operations on plain text data? I am sure 50% penalty is acceptable, 95% is probably not.
There are applications that are currently doing this without hardware support and accepting much worse than 95% performance loss to do so.
This hardware won’t make the technique attractive for ALL computation. But, it could dramatically increase the range of applications.
By bobbiechen 2026-03-1015:31 Agreed. When I was working on TEEs/confidential computing, just about everyone agreed that FHE was conceptually attractive (trust the math instead of trusting a hardware vendor) but the overhead of FHE was so insanely high. Think 1000x slowdowns turning your hour-long batch job into something that takes over a month to run instead.
By Foobar8568 2026-03-1016:001 reply Now we know why Intel more or less abandonned SEAL and rejected GPU requests.
By Foobar8568 2026-03-119:58 It's Microsoft who did the library, damn, I can't understand how I misremembered that after working on it for a few months last year.
By tromp 2026-03-1016:23 10,000x to 100,000x / 5,000x = 2 to 10x, not 20 to 100x.
This is incredible work.. And makes the technology absolutely viable.
However... In a world where privacy is constantly being eroded intentionally by governments and private companies, I think this will NEVER, ever reach any consumer grade hardware. My cynic could envision the technology export ban worldwide in the vein of RSA [0] .
Why would any company offer the customers real out of the box e2e encryption possibilities built into their devices.
DRM was mentioned by another user. This will not be used to enable privacy for the masses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
By FrasiertheLion 2026-03-1016:531 reply Arguably this is less useful for consumer hardware in the first place. This is mostly useful when I don’t trust the service provider with my data but still need to use their services (casting my vote, encrypted inference, and so forth)
By bilekas 2026-03-1016:59 True, in the case of casting a vote though for example, I would see it being used within the voting machines itself before sending off to be counted. Good application.
But getting them available for customers for example say even a PCIe card or something and then that automatically encrypting everything you ever run today over an encrypted connection would be a dream.
By autoexec 2026-03-1017:12 > In a world where privacy is constantly being eroded intentionally by governments and private companies, I think this will NEVER, ever reach any consumer grade hardware.
Why not when government can just force companies to backdoor their hardware for them. That way users are secure most of the time except from the government (until the backdoor in intel's chips gets discovered anyway), and users have a false sense of security/privacy so people are more likely to share their secrets with corporations and the government gets to spy on people communicating more openly with each other.
