I am working on the SEAL team and agree that these are reasonable concerns and questions. With open-sourcing we are hoping to build more trust in our implementa

I am working on the SEAL team and agree that these are reasonable concerns and questions. With open-sourcing we are hoping to build more trust in our implementation of this admittedly complicated technology. In addition to our internal code reviews at Microsoft, we are hoping to engage with the broader OSS and crypto researcher community in identifying and address any issues and concerns that are brought to our attention. Note also that the theory of homomorphic encryption has been developed in the open scientific community; all schemes and security estimates are backed up by published papers, and multiple other publicly available implementations. SEAL itself has been publicly available since 2015, although under a non-commercial license. In 2017 Microsoft helped launch the HomomorphicEncryption.org consortium for standardizing homomorphic encryption (see http://HomomorphicEncryption.org http://HomomorphicEncryption.org). Today, this group consists of more than 300 scientists from around the world, including partners and participants from industry (Microsoft, IBM, Duality Technologies, Intel, Google, multiple start-ups), top researchers from universities (MIT, Seoul National University, EPFL, ...), and government (e.g. NIST).