Benchmarking fhEVM

Zama fhEVM
1

Hello,

First of all, thank you for your research and hard work on FHEVM — I truly appreciate it. I’m currently writing a thesis on homomorphic encryption in the context of blockchain, and FHEVM provides a fantastic foundation for exploring this space.

As part of my thesis, I’m developing a simple card game with two implementations:

  1. A naïve version without encryption.
  2. A secure version using FHEVM.

My goal is to empirically compare the two in terms of CPU and memory usage, to better understand the resource demands of FHE in this type of application.

Does this approach make sense? More specifically: Is it possible to run all required components of the FHEVM stack locally — ideally in a containerized environment — so I can monitor the CPU and memory usage of each container during execution?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Best regards,
Remo

2

Hello

Good luck in your thesis!

I am not sure it’s doable today: the MPC part (which is used for decryption) is currently not completely open sourced, even if GitHub - zama-ai/threshold-fhe: Threshold MPC protocols for FHE is part of it. More opensourcing should come in 2025.

Also, fhevm is currently optimized to be as fast as possible, whatever it costs. We don’t particularly target memory usage for now, and we optimize for very powerful / very expensive machines. So not sure results on your local computer would be very meaningful.

Cheers