Microsoft has released the latest version of its open source homomorphic encryption library, Microsoft SEAL, and it now works with .NET
Homomorphic encryption provides the unique ability to compute on data while it is encrypted. This means users will, as the technology matures, be able to process encrypted data in the cloud, without having to download it for decryption on-premises, or provide a decryption key to a third party provider.
.NET meanwhile is Microsoft’s free, cross-platform, developer platform for building different types of applications. With .NET, users can tap multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build for web, mobile, desktop, gaming or IoT.
Microsoft SEAL version 3.2.0, released yesterday on GitHub comes with both the .NET wrapper library, and a few bug fixes, Microsoft said in a blog.
Read this: Microsoft Open Sources Homomorphic Encryption Library “SEAL”
The company’s cryptographic research team said: “Today, we are announcing the next step in democratizing homomorphic encryption for the broad developer ecosystem. We are excited to announce the release of Microsoft SEAL for .NET, a wrapper library that makes it easy to interact with Microsoft SEAL from any .NET application.”
“As we are working hard to eliminate any barriers to Microsoft SEAL adoption across our developer ecosystem, we are also releasing an in-depth scenario example which demonstrates how any developer can incorporate Microsoft SEAL for .NET in an application and perform different operations, such as matrix multiplications, additions, and subtractions using Azure Functions.”
Microsoft SEAL (open sourced early December 2018 under an MIT Licence for free use) has already been adopted by Intel to implement the underlying cryptography functions in its neural network compiler nGraph.
Microsoft has emerged as a leader in the emerging homomorphic encryption field, launched an initial standardisation workshop in July 2017, with a second following in March 2018. This rapidly led to the founding of an industry consortium; a third standardisation workshop followed in October 2018.
Its research team includes Kristin Lauter, a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the former President of the Association for Women in Mathematics and winner of the Selfridge Prize in Computational Number Theory.
Microsoft SEAL, or “Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library” was released in early December 2018 under an MIT Licence for free use.
