Towards practical privacy-preserving protocols

Abstract

Protecting users’ privacy in digital systems becomes more complex and challenging over time, as the amount of stored and exchanged data grows steadily and systems become increasingly involved and connected. Two techniques that try to approach this issue are the privacy-preserving protocols secure multi-party computation (MPC) and private information retrieval (PIR), which aim to enable practical computation while simultaneously keeping sensitive data private. In the dissertation [Daniel Demmler. “Towards Practical Privacy-Preserving Protocols”. Diss. Darmstadt: Technische Universität, 2018. url: http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/8605/], summarized in this article, we present results showing how real-world applications can be executed in a privacy-preserving way. This is not only desired by users of such applications, but since 2018 also based on a strong legal foundation with the GDPR in the European Union, that enforces privacy protection of user data by design.