[1][2] Development originally came out of the Cryptonets paper,[3] demonstrating that artificial intelligence algorithms could be run on homomorphically encrypted data.

[4] It is open-source (under the MIT License) and written in standard C++ without external dependencies and so it can be compiled cross platform.

An official .NET wrapper written in C# is available and makes it easier for .NET applications to interact with SEAL.

Microsoft SEAL supports both asymmetric and symmetric (added in version 3.4) encryption algorithms.

By default, data is compressed using the DEFLATE algorithm which achieves significant memory footprint savings when serializing objects such as encryption parameters, ciphertexts, plaintexts, and all available keys: Public, Secret, Relin (relinearization), and Galois.