Google Unveils HEIR Platform for Encrypted AI Processing

Google has developed an open-source platform called Homomorphic Encryption Intermediate Representation (HEIR) to help AI systems work with encrypted data. HEIR is a compiler toolchain and development platform for homomorphic encryption, which allows data to be processed while it remains encrypted, protecting sensitive information during computation.

The technology has significant computational overhead, but Google claims that the cost of homomorphic encryption is decreasing, making it practical for privacy-preserving data processing in fields such as healthcare and finance.

HEIR aims to simplify the development, optimization, and deployment of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) by providing infrastructure for performance testing and benchmarking. It also supports multiple FHE schemes, libraries, and front-end programming languages.