Cross-Platform Benchmarking of the FHE Libraries: Novel Insights into SEAL and Openfhe

The rapid growth of cloud computing and data-driven applications has amplified privacy concerns, driven by the increasing demand to process sensitive data securely. Homomorphic encryption (HE) has become a vital solution for addressing these concerns by enabling computations on encrypted data without revealing its contents. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of two leading HE libraries, SEAL and OpenFHE, examining their performance, usability, and support for prominent HE schemes such as BGV and CKKS. Our analysis highlights computational efficiency, memory usage, and scalability across Linux and Windows platforms, emphasizing their applicability in real-world scenarios. Results reveal that Linux outperforms Windows in computation efficiency, with OpenFHE emerging as the optimal choice across diverse cryptographic settings. This paper provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners to advance privacy-preserving applications using FHE.