Skip to main content
Pre-release

This release is a pre-release and may not be stable for production use.

SPU: Secure Processing Unit

CircleCI Python PyPI version OpenSSF Scorecard OpenSSF Best Practices

SPU (Secure Processing Unit) aims to be a provable, measurable secure computation device, which provides computation ability while keeping your private data protected.

SPU could be treated as a programmable device, it's not designed to be used directly. Normally we use SecretFlow framework, which use SPU as the underline secure computing device.

Currently, we mainly focus on provable security. It contains a secure runtime that evaluates XLA-like tensor operations, which use MPC as the underline evaluation engine to protect privacy information.

SPU python package also contains a simple distributed module to demo SPU usage, but it's NOT designed for production due to system security and performance concerns, please DO NOT use it directly in production.

Contribution Guidelines

If you would like to contribute to SPU, please check Contribution guidelines.

If you would like to use SPU for research purposes, please check research development guidelines from @fionser.

This documentation also contains instructions for build and testing.

Installation Guidelines

Supported platforms

Linux x86_64 Linux aarch64 macOS x64 macOS Apple Silicon Windows x64 Windows WSL2 x64
CPU yes yes yes1 yes no yes
NVIDIA GPU experimental no no n/a no experimental
  1. Due to CI resource limitation, macOS x64 prebuild binary is no longer available.

Instructions

Please follow Installation Guidelines to install SPU.

Hardware Requirements

General Features FourQ based PSI GPU
AVX/ARMv8 AVX2/ARMv8 CUDA 11.8+

Citing SPU

If you think SPU is helpful for your research or development, please consider citing our papers:

USENIX ATC'23

@inproceedings {spu,
    author = {Junming Ma and Yancheng Zheng and Jun Feng and Derun Zhao and Haoqi Wu and Wenjing Fang and Jin Tan and Chaofan Yu and Benyu Zhang and Lei Wang},
    title = {{SecretFlow-SPU}: A Performant and {User-Friendly} Framework for {Privacy-Preserving} Machine Learning},
    booktitle = {2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 23)},
    year = {2023},
    isbn = {978-1-939133-35-9},
    address = {Boston, MA},
    pages = {17--33},
    url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc23/presentation/ma},
    publisher = {USENIX Association},
    month = jul,
}

ICML'24

@inproceedings{ditto,
  title = {Ditto: Quantization-aware Secure Inference of Transformers upon {MPC}},
  author = {Wu, Haoqi and Fang, Wenjing and Zheng, Yancheng and Ma, Junming and Tan, Jin and Wang, Lei},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = {53346--53365},
  year = {2024},
  editor = {Salakhutdinov, Ruslan and Kolter, Zico and Heller, Katherine and Weller, Adrian and Oliver, Nuria and Scarlett, Jonathan and Berkenkamp, Felix},
  volume = {235},
  series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = {21--27 Jul},
  publisher = {PMLR},
  pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v235/main/assets/wu24d/wu24d.pdf},
  url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/wu24d.html},
  abstract = {Due to the rising privacy concerns on sensitive client data and trained models like Transformers, secure multi-party computation (MPC) techniques are employed to enable secure inference despite attendant overhead. Existing works attempt to reduce the overhead using more MPC-friendly non-linear function approximations. However, the integration of quantization widely used in plaintext inference into the MPC domain remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we propose the framework named Ditto to enable more efficient quantization-aware secure Transformer inference. Concretely, we first incorporate an MPC-friendly quantization into Transformer inference and employ a quantization-aware distillation procedure to maintain the model utility. Then, we propose novel MPC primitives to support the type conversions that are essential in quantization and implement the quantization-aware MPC execution of secure quantized inference. This approach significantly decreases both computation and communication overhead, leading to improvements in overall efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on Bert and GPT2 models to evaluate the performance of Ditto. The results demonstrate that Ditto is about $3.14\sim 4.40\times$ faster than MPCFormer (ICLR 2023) and $1.44\sim 2.35\times$ faster than the state-of-the-art work PUMA with negligible utility degradation.}
}

Acknowledgement

We thank the significant contributions made by Alibaba Gemini Lab and security advisories made by VUL337@NISL@THU.

Metadata

Release files for spu 0.10.0.dev20251211

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Built distributions (wheels)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for spu 0.10.0.dev20251211
File Interpreter ABI Platform
spu-0.10.0.dev20251211-cp311-none-manylinux_2_28_x86_64.whl CPython 3.11 none Linux glibc 2.28+ x86-64 Details
spu-0.10.0.dev20251211-cp311-none-manylinux_2_28_aarch64.whl CPython 3.11 none Linux glibc 2.28+ ARM64 Details
spu-0.10.0.dev20251211-cp311-none-macosx_14_0_arm64.whl CPython 3.11 none macOS 14.0+ ARM64 Details

Total release size: 110.7 MB

Release files / spu-0.10.0.dev20251211-cp311-none-manylinux_2_28_x86_64.whl

Download URL spu-0.10.0.dev20251211-cp311-none-manylinux_2_28_x86_64.whl
Size 40.2 MB
Tags CPython 3.11 Linux glibc 2.28+ x86-64
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
82e0888bc22f182c54dbc242966271848b0ef29a4670659701aede22d3aae39c
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
407f2ca836dfb21a8439460dd7ccc19746f980cf63bdff98e3daacd8ab043d25
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via uv/0.9.16 {"installer":{"name":"uv","version":"0.9.16","subcommand":["publish"]},"python":null,"implementation":{"name":null,"version":null},"distro":{"name":"AlmaLinux","version":"8.10","id":null,"libc":null},"system":{"name":null,"release":null},"cpu":null,"openssl_version":null,"setuptools_version":null,"rustc_version":null,"ci":true}

Release files / spu-0.10.0.dev20251211-cp311-none-manylinux_2_28_aarch64.whl

Download URL spu-0.10.0.dev20251211-cp311-none-manylinux_2_28_aarch64.whl
Size 40.0 MB
Tags CPython 3.11 Linux glibc 2.28+ ARM64
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
af00f2a1b256f71583560db3a172adc570021f694610705953e2cf6cc8156310
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
f583f847b2d26a01243a622c8d5d615dd96da5f9229a01607bcac729e7bba8ad
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via uv/0.9.16 {"installer":{"name":"uv","version":"0.9.16","subcommand":["publish"]},"python":null,"implementation":{"name":null,"version":null},"distro":{"name":"CentOS Linux","version":"8","id":null,"libc":null},"system":{"name":null,"release":null},"cpu":null,"openssl_version":null,"setuptools_version":null,"rustc_version":null,"ci":true}

Release files / spu-0.10.0.dev20251211-cp311-none-macosx_14_0_arm64.whl

Download URL spu-0.10.0.dev20251211-cp311-none-macosx_14_0_arm64.whl
Size 30.6 MB
Tags CPython 3.11 macOS 14.0+ ARM64
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
742ebccd3280101857f6adcbe0b44799ad7aa5b18908dac7589bb5783968eb0b
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
ef8ac673b0ee28430ae31d6f6da6168334ed0027b84265f723ff7af86259bca1
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via uv/0.9.17 {"installer":{"name":"uv","version":"0.9.17","subcommand":["publish"]},"python":null,"implementation":{"name":null,"version":null},"distro":{"name":"macOS","version":null,"id":null,"libc":null},"system":{"name":null,"release":null},"cpu":null,"openssl_version":null,"setuptools_version":null,"rustc_version":null,"ci":true}

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

This release

0.9.5

6 release files

0.9.4

6 release files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page