Hidden in Plain Sight: Privacy-Enhanced Computing Through Register Renaming

arXiv:2611.12570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privacy-Enhanced Computing (PEC) is a mechanism to hide program secrets from the outside world without paying the cost of fully-homomorphic encryption. Previous work has developed hardware mechanisms to achieve this goal but they require a dedicated processor enclave where all computations are done, requiring duplicate ALU resources and limiting the performance of PEC-utilizing applications due to not being able to access the full compute resources of the processor (e.g., multiple execution units and vector units), or not being able to execute PEC instructions in parallel and out-of-order.