Mariana Raykova — Secure Computation: Why, How and When

The goal of secure computation is to facilitate the evaluation of functionalities that depends on the private inputs of several distrusting parties in a privacy preserving manner which minimizes the information revealed about the inputs. In this talk we will introduce example problems motivating the work in the area of secure computation including problems related to machine learning. We will discuss how we formalize the notion of privacy in cryptographic protocols and how we prove privacy preserving properties for secure computation constructions. We will provide an overview of some main techniques and constructions for secure computation including Yao garbled circuits, approaches based an secret sharing and others. Lastly we will cover the different efficiency measures relevant for the practical use of secure computation protocols.