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Huelse / SEAL-Python

Microsoft SEAL 4.X For Python
MIT License
319 stars 66 forks source link

Pickling support #19

Closed carlee0 closed 3 years ago

carlee0 commented 4 years ago

Hi, it is quite inconvenient to always have to save and load from a binary file when working with the library. Another issue is the binary file compatibility (rather lack of) across different operating systems.

So I went ahead and added support for pickling (inspired by your earlier release and lab41's repo). It is quite useful to be able to pickle.dumps() the python object to a printable string to pass to a different process. I can open a PR if the feature is desired. Cheers!

Huelse commented 4 years ago

Wow, thanks for your work. I was thinking do it by myself not long ago. My main idea is not to change any code in the seal. I'm happy to see it.

carlee0 commented 4 years ago

The c++ source code of SEAL is left intact. Much of the work has been done in your earlier release and lab41. I merely added a deserialisation that supports the additional argument of SealContext. Glad it is of any help. :)

carlee0 commented 4 years ago

I noticed that loading is still not working properly with the objects requiring context. They remain none objects after loading. Reopening the issue and I will see if I can find a fix.

carlee0 commented 4 years ago

I find it unfeasible using pickle for the objects needing SealContext. A slight different approach of saving to and loading from printable strings are now added in #22. Corresponding tests for saves() and loads() of Plaintext and Ciphertext have also been added in the tests.

Huelse commented 4 years ago

It looks like you found out about it. The problem is you cannot pass two more parms into one pickle.

carlee0 commented 4 years ago

Yeah. I realised that after many failed attempts. :) Even tried to combing the But it's still nice with the ability of saving to strings. The communication is a lot leaner.

Too bad, it is still not platform agnostic without pickling.

Would it be possible to piece together the bytes of a context and a seal object, and pass it to the loads?

Huelse commented 4 years ago

That would be a solution, but you also need pass the other parms in it. For exmaple, add the needed parms in the class like Ciphertext, then we can pickle them together. But I don't wish this, it need to change the SEAL's code, not as good as you did.