PySEAL: A Python wrapper implementation of the SEAL homomorphic encryption library
This work addresses data privacy issues in bioinformatics and healthcare by providing an easier-to-use tool for researchers, though it is incremental as it primarily involves creating bindings for an existing library.
The authors tackled the challenge of making homomorphic encryption more accessible for bioinformatics by creating PySEAL, a Python wrapper for the SEAL library, which simplifies installation and integration into bioinformatics pipelines using Docker.
Motivation: The ability to perform operations on encrypted data has a growing number of applications in bioinformatics, with implications for data privacy in health care and biosecurity. The SEAL library is a popular implementation of fully homomorphic encryption developed in C++ by Microsoft Research. Despite the advantages of C++, Python is a flexible and dominant programming language that enables rapid prototyping of bioinformatics pipelines. Results: In an effort to make homomorphic encryption accessible to a broader range of bioinformatics scientists and applications, we present a Python binding implementation of the popular homomorphic encryption library, SEAL, using pybind11. The software contains a Docker image to facilitate easy installation and execution of the SEAL build process. Availability: All code is publicly available at https://github.com/Lab41/PySEAL Contact: lab41@iqt.org Supplementary information: Supplementary information is available on the Lab41 GitHub.