Microsoft SEAL

Development originally came out of the Cryptonets paper,{{Cite journal|last1=Downlin|first1=Nathan|last2=Gilad-Bachrach|first2=Ran|last3=Laine|first3=Kim|last4=Lauter|first4=Kirstin|last5=Naehrig|first5=Michael|last6=Wernsing|first6=John|date=2016-05-25|title=CryptoNets: Applying Neural Networks to Encrypted Data with High Throughput and Accuracy|url=http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/gilad-bachrach16.pdf|journal=Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180826211245/http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/gilad-bachrach16.pdf|archive-date=2018-08-26}} demonstrating that artificial intelligence algorithms could be run on homomorphically encrypted data.{{Cite web|url=https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/the-microsoft-simple-encrypted-arithmetic-library-goes-open-source/|title=The Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library goes open source|date=2018-12-03|website=Microsoft Research|language=en-US|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191112165543/https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/the-microsoft-simple-encrypted-arithmetic-library-goes-open-source/|archive-date=2019-11-12|access-date=2019-11-20}}

It is open-source (under the MIT License) and written in standard C++ without external dependencies and so it can be compiled cross platform. An official .NET wrapper written in C# is available and makes it easier for .NET applications to interact with SEAL.

Microsoft SEAL supports both asymmetric and symmetric (added in version 3.4) encryption algorithms.

Microsoft SEAL comes with two different homomorphic encryption schemes with very different properties:

• BFV:{{Cite journal|last1=Fan|first1=Junfeng|last2=Vercauteren|first2=Frederik|date=2012|title=Somewhat Practical Fully Homomorphic Encryption|url=https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/144}} The BFV scheme allows modular arithmetic to be performed on encrypted integers. For applications where exact values are necessary, the BFV scheme is the only choice.
• CKKS:{{Cite book|last1=Cheon|first1=Jung Hee|last2=Kim|first2=Andrey|last3=Kim|first3=Miran|last4=Song|first4=Yongsoo|title=Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2017 |chapter=Homomorphic Encryption for Arithmetic of Approximate Numbers |date=2017|editor-last=Takagi|editor-first=Tsuyoshi|editor2-last=Peyrin|editor2-first=Thomas|chapter-url=https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-70694-8_15|series=Lecture Notes in Computer Science|volume=10624|language=en|location=Cham|publisher=Springer International Publishing|pages=409–437|doi=10.1007/978-3-319-70694-8_15|isbn=978-3-319-70694-8|s2cid=3164123 }} The CKKS scheme allows additions and multiplications on encrypted real or complex numbers, but yields only approximate results. In applications such as summing up encrypted real numbers, evaluating machine learning models on encrypted data, or computing distances of encrypted locations CKKS is going to be by far the best choice.

Data compression can be achieved by building SEAL with Zlib support. By default, data is compressed using the DEFLATE algorithm which achieves significant memory footprint savings when serializing objects such as encryption parameters, ciphertexts, plaintexts, and all available keys: Public, Secret, Relin (relinearization), and Galois. Compression can always be disabled.

There are several known ports of SEAL to other languages in active development:

• [https://github.com/Microsoft/SEAL Microsoft SEAL] (Microsoft's source)

• [https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Research.SEALNet/ NuGet] (Microsoft's official package)

• [https://github.com/Lab41/PySEAL PySEAL]
• [https://github.com/Huelse/SEAL-Python SEAL-Python]
• [https://github.com/tf-encrypted/tf-seal tf-seal]
• [https://github.com/ibarrond/Pyfhel Pyfhel]

• [https://github.com/morfix-io/node-seal node-seal]
• [https://github.com/PrivateSky/sealjs sealjs]

• [https://github.com/morfix-io/node-seal node-seal]

{{Reflist}}

{{Portal|Free and open-source software}}

• {{Website|https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/microsoft-seal|Microsoft SEAL: Fast and Easy-to-Use Homomorphic Encryption Library}}
• {{Github|https://github.com/Microsoft/SEAL}}

{{Microsoft FOSS}}

{{Microsoft Research}}

Category:Homomorphic encryption

Category:Cryptographic software

Category:Free and open-source software

SEAL

Category:Microsoft Research

Category:Free software programmed in C++

Category:Software using the MIT license

Category:2018 software