Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Processing and encryption of content are generally considered sequential and independent operations. In certain scenarios, it is, however, desirable to carry out processing directly on encrypted data to preserve the privacy of the data owners. In this direction, the cryptographic community has provided several secure computation tools and, in the last 10 years, we observed significant improvements in the related cryptographic techniques. However, mainly due to their high complexity, only few ready-to-go fully integrated solutions are currently available. For this reason there is the need of an engineering approach in order to optimize the protocols and satisfy both privacy, accuracy and complexity requirements.

This seminar first concisely summarizes some of the cryptographic primitives used in existing solutions to processing of encrypted data, and discusses implications of the security requirements on these solutions. The seminar then proposes an approach for the development of efficient privacy preserving applications, focusing on some application domains in which secure data processing has been taken up as a challenge, namely, analysis of biomedical data, remote biometric recognition, and privacy-preserving IoT device coordination. Finally, the seminar discusses the challenges and open issues in the field of secure data processing and other research directions.