Homomorphic Encryption library or HElib is a free and open-source

cross platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

software developed by IBM that implements various forms of

homomorphic encryption Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that permits users to perform computations on its encrypted data without first decrypting it. These resulting computations are left in an encrypted form which, when decrypted, result in an identical ...

History

HElib was primarily developed by

Shai Halevi Shai Halevi ( he, שי הלוי; born 1966) is a computer scientist who works on cryptography research at Algorand Foundation, a blockchain startup founded by Silvio Micali. Born in Israel in 1966, Halevi received a B.A. and M.Sc. in computer sc ...

and

Victor Shoup Victor Shoup is a computer scientist and mathematician. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1989, and he did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He is a professor at ...

, shortly after

Craig Gentry Craig Alan Gentry (born November 29, 1983) is an American former professional baseball outfielder. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Texas Rangers, Oakland Athletics, Los Angeles Angels and Baltimore Orioles. Baseball career ...

was a researcher at IBM, with the initial release being on May 5th 2013.

Features

The library implements the Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan (BGV) fully homomorphic encryption scheme, as well as optimizations such as Smart-Vercauteren ciphertext packing techniques. HElib is written in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

and uses the NTL mathematical library.

References

{{IBM FOSS Homomorphic encryption Cryptographic software Free and open-source software IBM software