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2. Trusted Hardware Acceleration for Function Secret Sharing

 # Trusted Hardware Acceleration for Function Secret Sharing

  ![Publication image](/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/default_images/default.jpeg?itok=TfIobf92 "Publication image")

 Function secret sharing (FSS) is a core building block for privacy-preserving systems such as secure inference and private information retrieval (PIR), but incurs significant overhead in key generation, communication, and data [this http URL](http://movement.we/) present the distributed function accelerator (DFA), a hardware accelerator that targets the dominant primitive in FSS: distributed point function (DPF) generation and evaluation. DFA combines a high-throughput fixed-function engine for AES-based pseudorandom number generation with a lightweight programmable unit for protocol-specific logic. In untrusted mode, DFA serves as a pure accelerator for DPF evaluation, improving throughput and energy efficiency without changing the protocol. In trusted mode, it further enables local, on-the-fly key generation, eliminating key distribution, and reducing storage and data movement overheads.
Across representative workloads, DFA achieves a reduction of 10X end-to-end latency, a reduction of up to 20X communication and more than 5X energy savings for secure inference; and an improvement of 5X throughput and 10X energy reduction for PIR, with modest hardware cost.

 ## Authors

Pengzhi Huang (Cornell University)

Kiwan Maeng (Pennsylvania State University)

G. Edward Suh (NVIDIA/Cornell University)

 ## Publication Date

Monday, August 17, 2026

 ## Published in

[Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16223)

 ## Research Area

[Security](/research-area/security)