Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed what they claim is the first successful side-channel attack on an emerging security technology called homomorphic encryption. Homomorphic encryption allows for computing operations to be performed directly on encrypted data without the use of a secret key. The attack technique involves a vulnerability in a Microsoft implementation of fully homomorphically encryption called Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (SEAL) Microsoft SEAL is aware of the issue and has claimed newer versions of the software are affected. The researchers at NC State required equipment costing less than $1,000 and about an hour to execute the attacks.”]