Privacy-Preserving Technologies and Applied Cryptography with ZKP

Ensuring provable privacy can only be done by cryptographic protocols, but it is hindered by the required computational overhead. While recent years have witnessed drastic improvements in runtime for provable (i.e., cryptographically secure) privacy-preserving computing (P^3C), maintaining acceptable runtime and low overhead in practical applications remains a challenge. To ensure practicability and wide-scale usage, there is a dire need to bridge the gap between the P^3C and plaintext computation in terms of runtime, while defining the applicability of P^3C protocols. Although statistical methods can be utilized to anonymize data with more manageable overhead, they are limited in probability of privacy and have been shown to be vulnerable to attack.  ACES Lab is focused on building state-of-the-art privacy-preserving systems at the intersection of multiple cutting-edge domains, reaching the overhead that is achieved in statistical methods while still ensuring provable privacy. The most prominent works in this research thrust have utilized prominent privacy-preserving techniques, such as multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption, to ensure practical, provable privacy in end-to-end systems.

Our recent prominent research has primarily focused on Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs).  ZKPs are a set of cryptographic primitives that allows a prover to convince a verifier that an evaluation of computation f on P’s private input w, also called the witness, is correct without revealing anything about w. ZKPs have limitless potential, however, their presence in mainstream applications has been primarily limited to the blockchain. While there have been recent works that apply ZKPs to different domains, the general perception of ZKPs is that their home is on the blockchain. Our work aims to change this perception by building novel end-to-end systems that secure learning paradigms and other real-world applications with ZKPs. To ensure practicality in our end-to-end systems, we also conduct extensive research on hardware/software co-design of ZKP operations on reconfigurable hardware.