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Abstract
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have attracted significant attention in
response to privacy regulations, driving the development of applications that
prioritize user data protection. At the same time, the information and
communication technology (ICT) sector faces growing pressure to reduce its
environmental footprint, particularly its energy consumption. While numerous
studies have assessed the energy consumption of ICT applications, the
environmental impact of cryptographic PETs remains largely unexplored.
This work investigates this question by measuring the energy consumption
increase induced by three PETs compared to their non-private counterparts: TLS,
Searchable Encryption, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). These
technologies were chosen for two reasons. First, they cover different maturity
levels -- from the widely deployed TLS protocol to the emerging FHE schemes --
allowing us to examine the influence of maturity on energy consumption. Second,
they each have well-established applications in industry: web browsing,
encrypted databases, and privacy-preserving machine learning.
Our results reveal highly variable energy consumption increases, ranging from
2x for TLS to 10x for Searchable Encryption and 100,000x for FHE. Our
experiments demonstrate a simple and reproducible methodology, based on
existing open-source software, to quantify the energy costs of PETs. They also
highlight the wide spectrum of energy demands across technologies, underscoring
the importance of further research on sustainable PET design. Finally, we
discuss orthogonal research directions, such as hardware acceleration, to
outline promising directions toward sustainable PETs.