Samsung Is Building Homomorphic Encryption Into Hardware. The 2024 Grants Show It.

There is a reliable tell that a cryptographic technique is about to get fast: a major chip and memory manufacturer starts patenting it as a system. Algorithms live in software for years as research; when a Samsung or an Intel begins filing on apparatus and hardware-friendly methods, the technology is being readied for silicon — and silicon is where homomorphic encryption's crippling slowness finally gets addressed.

Samsung Electronics did exactly that across 2024. US11870889B2, “Method and apparatus with homomorphic encryption” (January 2024), is the anchor, joined by US12184755B2 on a homomorphic system for approximate arithmetic and US12184771B2 on encryption-key generation and ciphertext operation. All cluster under H04L 9/008.

Read as a set, the giveaway is the word “apparatus” and the recurring “system” framing. These are not purely algorithmic claims; they read like the groundwork for accelerators and integrated systems. The CPC tags lean on the arithmetic core (H04L 9/008 plus H04L 9/0618), exactly the heavy modular and polynomial operations that a dedicated hardware block would target.

The strategic logic is the same as it was for AI accelerators. Homomorphic encryption is bottlenecked on a small set of arithmetic-intensive operations; the company that builds the memory and compute can build hardware that does those operations far faster than general-purpose CPUs. For a vendor whose business is memory and chips, owning the homomorphic-acceleration IP is a way to sell the silicon the privacy-preserving future will need.

Per the desk's rules: these are issued grants (B2), not applications, and they describe methods and apparatus, not announced products. A patent cluster is a position, not a product roadmap — but the composition of the cluster (apparatus, systems, key generation) is itself the strategic message.

For the IP-strategy reader, this is the inflection worth flagging. When homomorphic-encryption patents move from universities and software firms to a tier-one chipmaker, and the claims tilt toward apparatus, the field is crossing from “interesting if slow” toward “hardware-accelerated and deployable.” Samsung's 2024 cluster is one of the clearest markers of that crossing.