PALISADE Homomorphic Encryption Software Library

Community Growth:  We are always welcoming of new contributors for the PALISADE community.  Please email contact@palisade-crypto.org with inquiries about a specific project you might be interested in that improves and builds on the PALISADE project. 

PALISADE is an open-source project that provides efficient implementations of lattice cryptography building blocks and leading homomorphic encryption schemes.

PALISADE is designed for usability, providing simpler APIs, modularity, cross-platform support and integration of hardware accelerators.  PALISADE complies with the HomomorphicEncryption.org security standards for homomorphic encryption.  We offer PALISADE under the 2-clause BSD open-source license, making it easier to wrap and redistribute PALISADE in products.

PALISADE now supports the BGV, BFV, CKKS, and FHEW schemes and a more secure variant of the TFHE scheme, including bootstrapping.  We have more efficient bootstrapping schemes in active development.  PALISADE also provides post-quantum public-key encryption, proxy re-encryption, threshold FHE for multiparty computations, identity-based encryption, attribute-based encryption and digital signature support. 

Based on the PALISADE community’s collaboration with Prof. Daniele Micciancio from UCSD  and his PhD student Baiyu Li, we have developed an enhancement to CKKS that addresses their recently published observation (https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1533) that the IND-CPA model may not be strong enough for some special practical applications that use approximate homomorphic encryption schemes such as CKKS.  You can read our longer discussion of this topic here, about how our enhancement to CKKS was released in PALISADE v1.10.6 and shared with other major open-source FHE libraries.

PALISADE development continues to be generously supported by DARPA, IARPA, the Sloan Foundation and others.  Core contributors to PALISADE include engineers and scientists from leading defense contractors, start-ups and universities. 

PALISADE is formally affiliated with the NumFocus stable of open-source software projects.

The PALISADE Team hosts regular webinars on FHE and PALISADE.  You can check on upcoming webinars and watch the prior recordings at the Webinars page.

We also have an announcements Google group that anyone can join: https://groups.google.com/a/palisade-crypto.org/d/forum/announcements 

Homomorphic Encryption (core PALISADE library)

PALISADE is an open source project. The current stable release of the PALISADE software library is v1.10.6. The stable release can be downloaded here.

Installation instructions and further technical documentation for the stable release are available on the PALISADE git repository wiki here.

PALISADE is under active development. The current development repository of the project can be found here.

The current development release of the PALISADE software is v1.11.0. The development release can be downloaded here. Please also see the release notes for more information on the capabilities that have not been included in the stable release yet.

We suggest experienced PALISADE users try out the current development release as it contains the latest crypto schemes as well as overall performance improvements. Once we have determined that the development release is stable, it will be migrated to the release repository.

Other Lattice-Based Cryptography Capabilities (extensions of core PALISADE library)

As of v1.11, we are moving digital signatures, identity-based/attribute-based encryption, and some research prototypes to separate git repositories (currently this change is only implemented in the master branch of the development repository). Below are the locations of the new repositories.

• Digital Signatures

• Identity-Based & Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption

• Research Prototypes (includes research prototypes for Key-Policy Attributed-Based Encryption and Program Obfuscation)

Homomorphic Encryption Demos and Advanced Examples

There are also several git repositories with applications and more advanced examples that we encourage the PALISADE users to explore:

• Encrypted Circuit Emulator: demonstrates how the PALISADE implementation of FHEW and TFHE can be used execute circuits described in various formats

• Integer Examples: demonstrates how the PALISADE implementation of BFV can be used for encrypted substring search

• Python Demos: includes a Python wrapper and examples showing how to write Python 3 applications that use PALISADE

• Serialization Examples: shows examples of PALISADE serialization for cryptography applications between cooperating processes

If you want to get involved in the PALISADE project, please contact our team at contact@palisade-crypto.org.

The PALISADE user manual for the current stable release is available here. The user manual, though updated each release is a constant work in progress. It tries to be accessible to the novice user, but it does assume a large amount of working knowledge in lattice cryptography, specifically with respect to the published schemes and their operators. As such the documentation for various operators and encodings is often lacking detail.

Installation instructions and further technical documentation for the stable release are available on the PALISADE git repository wiki here.

Similar documentation for the current development release (1.11.0) can be found in the development repository here.

The source for this documentation currently isn’t in the repository, so please send any suggestions for improvement to us at

• PALISADE Project contact@palisade-crypto.org

or one of us at

• PALISADE Project Leads:
  • Dave Cousins dcousins@dualitytech.com, dcousins@njit.edu
  • Kurt Rohloff krohloff@dualitytech.com, rohloff@njit.edu
  • Yuriy Polyakov ypolyakov@dualitytech.com

Contributors and Users: Members of the following organizations are or have been contributors or users of the PALISADE library:

• Duality Technologies
• NJIT (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
• MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• CACI / LGS Innovations (Lucent Government Systems)
• Two Six Labs
• Information Sciences Institute
• New York University (NYU)
• University of Southern California
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Notre Dame University
• Raytheon BBN Technologies
• UCSD (University of California San Diego)
• Perspecta Labs / Applied Communication Sciences (ACS) / Vencore Labs
• Sabanci University
• Galois, Inc.
• EUROCOM
• Waseda University
• Northeastern University
• Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)
• National University of Singapore
• University of Toronto
• New York University (NYU)
• University of Michigan
• Old Dominion University
• Royal Holloway, University of London
• University of Texas

Sponsors: The following organizations and projects have been providing generous sponsorship for the PALISADE project:

• DARPA CSL (2020-present): This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Agreement No. HR00112090102.
• DARPA MARSHAL (2017-2021): Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US Navy SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific (SSCPAC) under Contract Number N66001-17-1-4043. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
• IARPA HECTOR (2019-2020) : This research is based upon work supported in part by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), via Contract No. 2019-1902070006. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of ODNI, IARPA, or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for  governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation therein.
• DARPA SAFEWARE (2015-2019) : Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) under Contract Numbers W911NF-15-C-0226 and W911NF-15-C-0233. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
• IARPA RAMPARTS (2016-2018) : This research is based upon work supported in part by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either express or implied, of ODNI, IARPA, or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation therein.
• NIH SBIR GEARS (2017-2018): Research reported in this publication was supported by National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award number 1R43HG010123.
• NSA CAE (2015-2016) : Project sponsored by the National Security Agency under Grant H98230-15-1-0274. The United States Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints notwithstanding any copyright notice herein.
• Simons Foundation (2015-2016)
• Sloan Foundation (2017-present)

We welcome additional material from the community. Please send any suggestions, additional suggested documentation and general correspondence to

• PALISADE Project contact@palisade-crypto.org

or

• PALISADE Project Leads:
  • Kurt Rohloff krohloff@dualitytech.com, rohloff@njit.edu
  • Dave Cousins dcousins@dualitytech.com, dcousins@njit.edu
  • Yuriy Polyakov ypolyakov@dualitytech.com

We also have an announcements Google group that anyone can join: https://groups.google.com/a/palisade-crypto.org/d/forum/announcements