UniHENN: Designing More Versatile Homomorphic Encryption-based CNNs without im2col

Homomorphic encryption enables computations on encrypted data without decryption, which is crucial for privacy-preserving cloud services. However, deploying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with homomorphic encryption encounters significant challenges, particularly in converting input data into a two-dimensional matrix for convolution, typically achieved using the im2col technique. While efficient, this method limits the variety of deployable CNN models due to compatibility constraints with the encrypted data structure. UniHENN, a homomorphic encryption-based CNN architecture, eliminates the need for im2col, ensuring compatibility with a diverse range of CNN models using homomorphic encryption. Our experiments demonstrate that UniHENN surpasses the leading 2D CNN inference architecture, PyCrCNN, in inference time, as evidenced by its performance on the LeNet-1 dataset, where it averages 30.090 seconds–significantly faster than PyCrCNN's 794.064 seconds. Furthermore, UniHENN outperforms TenSEAL, which employs im2col, in processing concurrent images, an essential feature for high-demand cloud applications. The versatility of UniHENN is proven across various CNN architectures, including 1D and six different 2D CNNs, highlighting its flexibility and efficiency. These qualities establish UniHENN as a promising solution for privacy-preserving, cloud-based CNN services, addressing the increasing demand for scalable, secure, and efficient deep learning in cloud computing environments.