Soft Error Rate Evaluation and Silent Data Corruption Detection for Reliable TFHE Computations on GPUs

This research evaluates how often cosmic ray-induced errors (soft errors, which are random bit flips caused by radiation) occur in GPU-based fully homomorphic encryption (FHE, a technique that lets computers perform calculations on encrypted data without decrypting it first). The study finds these errors happen at a rate of 7.80 FIT (Failures In Time, meaning 7.80 errors per billion hours of operation) and estimates that large matrix multiplication operations could have a 1.6% chance of silent data corruption (SDC, when errors occur but go undetected). To address this problem, the researchers propose using logic circuit-level redundancy (duplicating parts of the computation to check for errors) to detect nearly all silent data corruptions.