MIT 6.5610 Applied Cryptography - Spring 2026 Project

Team members: Adhitya Mangudy Venkata Ganesh, Nicola Lawford, Ishan Satish Pednekar, Li Xuan Tan

Problem: Performing singular value decomposition on a matrix encrypted using fully homomorphic encryption.

Setup

<TODO: figure out OS quirks?>

This script builds and installs OpenFHE and OpenFHE-Python for FHERMA challenges.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Fherma-challenges/toolchain
cd toolchain
sh prepare_env_debian.sh

If you are using Windows, run on WSL and use the following before running prepare_env_debian.sh to ensure line endings are correct:

sed -i 's/\r$//' prepare_env_debian.sh

<TODO: figure out if pip install works?>

Solution validation

• Install Docker Desktop 4.37.1 or later. If you are using windows, ensure WSL backend is configured
• Run docker pull yashalabinc/fherma-validator.
• From the root of this repo, run sudo docker run -ti -v $(pwd):/fherma yashalabinc/fherma-validator --project-folder=/fherma/openfhe-python --testcase=/fherma/fherma-svd/tests/test_case.json.
• A result.json file will be generated in the project folder.
• Troubleshooting: The fherma-svd directory should contian a tests directory with .json files representing test cases. The openfhe-python directory should contain your python solution. See Docker validator provided by FHERMA.
• Note: We may need to edit the project structure to match the challenge format.

ORCD Engaging Cluster

• Get an account following the startup guide and SSH into a Centos 7 node.
• salloc -p mit_normal -c 12 --mem=54G to request a machine with 12 CPU/54GB RAM just like the FHERMA configuration, on the mit_normal ORCD cluster.
• Once logged in, run the following:
  • module purge
  • module load gcc/12.2.0
  • module load cmake/3.27.9
• Install OpenFHE by compiling from source as per official instructions. For CMake, use the command

CC=$(which gcc) CXX=$(which g++) cmake \
    -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-static-libstdc++ -static-libgcc" \
    -DCMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS="-static-libstdc++ -static-libgcc" \
    -DCMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS="-static-libstdc++ -static-libgcc" \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/openfhe-install ..
    ..

where the last line points to a userspace install location (since we don't have sudo access on Engaging). Run an example or two to verify successful installation.

• Default ORCD modules don't have recent-enough Python versions. Load ORCD's conda distribution with module load miniforge/25.11.0-0 and verify that python --version returns 3.10+.
• Create a virtual environment, activate it and pip install "pybind11[global]".
• Install OpenFHE-Python by compiling from source as per official instructions. For CMake, use

CC=$(which gcc) CXX=$(which g++) cmake \
   -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-static-libstdc++ -static-libgcc" \
   -DCMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS="-static-libstdc++ -static-libgcc" \
   -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=~/openfhe-install ..

• Add OpenFHE-Python install to PYTHONPATH: export PYTHONPATH=/home/< your login here >/openfhe-python/build:$PYTHONPATH. Python examples should run fine now.
• To use the validator, use the cluster's Singularity/Apptainer install (compatible with Docker images). Run singularity pull fherma-validator.sif docker://yashalabinc/fherma-validator to pull the Dockerfile and save it locally, then singularity run --bind $(pwd):/fherma ./fherma-validator.sif --project-folder=/fherma/openfhe-python --testcase=/fherma/fherma-svd/tests/test_case.json to run the validation script.

Resources

• openfhe-python implementation template from OpenFHE
• FHERMA Challenge - Singular Value Decomposition
• Docker validator provided by FHERMA
• OpenFHE-Python library
• FHERMA challenge toolchain
• OpenFHE Documentation