Support serialization/deserialization functions

[xhuan28]

Other HE libraries, such as SEAL, have serialization/deserialization functions. Do you plan to develop such kind of functions for IPCL as well? Thanks.

[skmono]

@xhuan28 Thanks for your suggestion! We plan to add these features on our next release v1.2.

[xhuan28]

I noticed that the serialization and deserialization have been supported in BigNumber and PublicKey of branch 2.0. Thanks for the prompt implementation.
Could you also implement the save() and load() API for PrivateKey? Though the private key usually is stored at local, there is a user scenario that we first serialize the private key and then store it to a file in the local storage.
Thanks.

[skmono]

Yes, we are working on supporting serialization for PrivateKey and CipherText. It should be added with to the 2.0 release version (upstream release)
We'll let you know when its complete!

[xhuan28]

@skmono There is another issue about serialization/deserialization. When I tried to serialize a negative big number and then deserialize it. The negative sign of the big number is lost consequently. According to the code here, the cause is, the deserialization function always assume a positive value. Is it possible to serialize the sign as well as the vector?
I submit a PR(#45) to fix this.

[xhuan28]

I implemented the feature of PrivateKey serialization and the corresponding unit test for it. @justalittlenoob, Could you please review the PR(#77). Thanks.