HyPHEN: A Hybrid Packing Method and Its Optimizations for Homomorphic Encryption-Based Neural Networks

Convolutional neural network (CNN) inference using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a promising private inference (PI) solution due to the capability of FHE that enables offloading the whole computation process to the server while protecting the privacy of sensitive user data. Prior FHE-based CNN (HCNN) work has demonstrated the feasibility of constructing deep neural network architectures such as ResNet using FHE. Despite these advancements, HCNN still faces significant challenges in practicality due to the high computational and memory overhead. To overcome these limitations, we present HyPHEN, a deep HCNN construction that incorporates novel convolution algorithms (RAConv and CAConv), data packing methods (2D gap packing and PRCR scheme), and optimization techniques tailored to HCNN construction. Such enhancements enable HyPHEN to substantially reduce the memory footprint and the number of expensive homomorphic operations, such as ciphertext rotation and bootstrapping. As a result, HyPHEN brings the latency of HCNN CIFAR-10 inference down to a practical level at 1.4 seconds (ResNet-20) and demonstrates HCNN ImageNet inference for the first time at 14.7 seconds (ResNet-18).