Updates on HEIR, the Homomorphic Encryption Compiler Project

Google's HEIR project is a compiler that converts programs to operate directly on encrypted data using homomorphic encryption, enabling services to perform computations without ever accessing unencrypted information about inputs, outputs, or intermediate values. The project can successfully compile pre-trained machine learning models, with practical examples like a credit card fraud detector demonstrating functionality, though operations remain computationally expensive (taking over 2 seconds for inference on a simple neural network). HEIR aims to enable perfectly private inference services where sensitive data never needs to be decrypted during processing.