FAQ

This is an evolving list based on the questions we receive :)

How do I use Parasol in web3?

While Parasol can be used in web3, we have a web3-specific offering we’ve developed called the secure processing framework (SPF). SPF makes use of Parasol under-the-hood and will offer you a much better experience as a dApp developer.

Can I use Parasol with threshold TFHE?

Yes, you can. However, if you’re using threshold FHE you’ll likely want a corresponding service that responds to decryption requests and checks access control; these services will be provided as part of our secure processing framework.

Can Parasol be used with different FHE schemes?

Yes, but it requires quite a bit of work on the backend for our team. Parasol today uses our variant of the TFHE scheme. TFHE offers developers access to a wide variety of operations (compared to the BFV or CKKS fully homomorphic encryption schemes) as well as unbounded computation, making it highly suitable for a wide variety of use cases.

I’m not getting good performance when running programs. Why?!

This may be due to one (or even all) of the following reasons:

• Check you’re running in release mode (not debug mode).
• You may be running the program on a machine with insufficient cores. Our TFHE scheme variant shines if you have sufficient computing resources; a rough heuristic is you want to run the program on a machine that has as many cores as input bits (e.g. if you want to add two 16-bit integers together, you need ~32 cores).
• While program runtime may be fast, key generation for our TFHE variant is fairly expensive (i.e. many seconds to even minutes depending on the machine). You should serialize the generated keys to disk and cache them.