Make PySeal Pickleable

[nilslukas]

Ciphertext and Plaintext modules are not pickleable. Would be great if that worked +1: (Can't use pickle to serialize objects. Could be used for multithreading)

[cem-ozturk]

Hi @NilsHendrikLukas , did you find any alternative solution to pickle or anyway to save the ciphertext objects to a file?

[toddstavish]

PySEAL has native dependencies, subsequently it may be unpickleable.

On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 8:34 AM, c3m0zturk notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi @NilsHendrikLukas https://github.com/NilsHendrikLukas , did you find any alternative solution to pickle or anyway to save the ciphertext objects to a file?

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[nilslukas]

@c3m0zturk Saving the ciphertext object to a file shouldn't be a problem. SEAL already provides a 'save' and 'load' function that take streams as parameters. I couldn't get python streams to work, but the easiest workaround would probably be to add an extra function which creates an ostream to a file and embed it into SEAL/ciphertext.cpp:

#include <fstream>
[..]
 void Ciphertext::save_to_file() const
    {
        ofstream outfile("ciphertext.bin", std::ofstream::binary);
        save(outfile);
        outfile.close();
    }

Then in SEAL/ciphertext.h add a function header

void save_to_file() const;

and in SEALPython/wrapper.cpp add the following line

py::class_<Ciphertext>(m, "Ciphertext")
    .def(py::init<>())
    [...] /* all other definitions */
    .def("save_to_file", (void (Ciphertext::*)()) &Ciphertext::save_to_file, "Saves ciphertext to file")

[adityachivu]

@NilsHendrikLukas Thanks for the update! @c3m0zturk and I used a similar workaround by writing a new function that takes string input for file path. We included save/load for PublicKey and SecretKey as well.

@toddstavish I have made these changes on my fork. Does it make sense to submit a PR?

[toddstavish]

Yes, a PR would be happily received. Sorry for missing this in the original port. I designed this set up and an extremely talented intern finished it up. Thought we had covered all of the major functions.

On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 3:01 AM Aditya Chivukula notifications@github.com wrote:

@NilsHendrikLukas https://github.com/NilsHendrikLukas Thanks for the update! @c3m0zturk https://github.com/c3m0zturk and I used a similar workaround by writing a new function that takes string input for file path. We included save/load for PublicKey and SecretKey as well.

@toddstavish https://github.com/toddstavish I have made these changes on my fork. Does it make sense to submit a PR?

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[nilslukas]

@toddstavish I also made a PR to add Pickle serialization. It does not conflict with any native dependencies, thus it should be platform independent. I think this feature is quite important, because now with Pythons multiprocessing library one can get linear speedups depending on the number of cores (limited by the number of used plaintext moduli ofc).