Tutorial

Using the JS on WASM API

Welcome to this TFHE-rs JS on WASM API tutorial!

TFHE-rs uses WASM to expose a JS binding to the client-side primitives, like key generation and encryption, of the Boolean and shortint modules.

There are several limitations at this time. Due to a lack of threading support in WASM, key generation can be too slow to be practical for bigger parameter sets.

Some parameter sets lead to FHE keys that are too big to fit in the 2GB memory space of WASM. This means that some parameters sets are virtually unusable.

First steps using TFHE-rs JS on WASM API

Setting-up TFHE-rs JS on WASM API for use in nodejs programs.

To build the JS on WASM bindings for TFHE-rs, you will first need to install wasm-packarrow-up-right in addition to a compatible (>= 1.65) rust toolchainarrow-up-right.

Then, in a shell run the following to clone the TFHE-rs repo (one may want to checkout a specific tag, here the default branch is used for the build):

$ git clone https://github.com/zama-ai/tfhe-rs.git
Cloning into 'tfhe-rs'...
...
Resolving deltas: 100% (3866/3866), done.
$ cd tfhe-rs
$ cd tfhe
$ rustup run wasm-pack build --release --target=nodejs --features=boolean-client-js-wasm-api,shortint-client-js-wasm-api
[INFO]: Compiling to Wasm...
...
[INFO]: :-) Your wasm pkg is ready to publish at ...

The command above targets nodejs. A binding for a web browser can be generated as well using --target=web. This use case will not be discussed in this tutorial.

Both Boolean and shortint features are enabled here but it's possible to use one without the other.

After the build, a new directory pkg is present in the tfhe directory.

Commented code to generate keys for shortint and encrypt a ciphertext

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Be sure to update the path of the required clause in the example below for the TFHE package that was just built.

The example.js script can then be run using nodearrow-up-right like so:

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