Yi-Ting Xiao Successfully Defends Master’s Thesis

We are proud to share that Yi-Ting (Momo) Xiao has successfully defended her master’s thesis, “Accelerating Client-Side Homomorphic Encryption Operations in Edge Systems,” at Arizona State University.

Her research addresses a growing challenge in modern computing. As devices such as wearable health monitors and smart sensors rely more on cloud services, protecting sensitive data during processing becomes essential. Homomorphic encryption offers a solution by allowing computation to be performed directly on encrypted data, but its high computational cost has limited its use on edge devices.

Yi-Ting’s work focuses on making this technique practical for edge systems. She developed a hardware-accelerated architecture for client-side homomorphic encryption operations, improving performance in resource-constrained environments. Her design includes three specialized cryptographic samplers and a complete key generation accelerator based on the CKKS scheme, all implemented and validated on FPGA hardware.

This work represents an important step toward secure and efficient edge computing, with applications in healthcare, IoT, and privacy-preserving machine learning.

She will continue her research journey as she embarks on a PhD starting in Fall 2026.