Humanitarian organizations distribute aid to people affected by armed conflicts or natural disasters. Digitalization has the potential to increase the efficiency and fairness of aid-distribution systems, and recent work by Wang et al. has shown that these benefits are possible without creating privacy harms for aid recipients. However, their work only provides a solution for one particular aid-distribution scenario in which aid recipients receive a predefined set of goods. Yet, in many situations it is desirable to enable recipients to decide which items they need at each moment to satisfy their specific needs. We formalize these needs into functional, deployment, security, and privacy requirements, and design a privacy-preserving digital wallet for aid distribution. Our smart-card-based solution enables aid recipients to spend a predefined budget at different vendors to obtain the items that they need. We prove our solution's security and privacy properties, and show it is practical at scale.

Homomorphic encryption has become a practical solution for protecting the privacy of computations on sensitive data. However, existing homomorphic encryption pipelines do not guarantee the correctness of the computation result in the presence of a malicious adversary. We propose two plaintext encodings compatible with state-of-the-art fully homomorphic encryption schemes that enable practical client-verification of homomorphic computations while supporting all the operations required for modern privacy-preserving analytics. Based on these encodings, we introduce VERITAS, a ready-to-use library for the verification of computations executed over encrypted data. VERITAS is the first library that supports the verification of any homomorphic operation. We demonstrate its practicality for various applications and, in particular, we show that it enables verifiability of homomorphic analytics with less than 3x computation overhead compared to the homomorphic encryption baseline.

We revisit the problem of constructing protocols for multiparty private set intersection (MPSI) in light of the recent advances in multiparty homomorphic encryption (MHE). In MPSI, N ≥ 2 parties jointly compute the intersection of their respective private set. Kissner and Song proposed an MHE-based MPSI scheme in 2005, but their approach was limited by the then-available HE schemes. Today, however, MHE schemes have become both more versatile and more efficient. As an early result, we implemented the MPSI approach of Kissner et al. with the recently proposed Helium framework (CCS 2024) for MHE-based MPC. We show that even this simple protocol can outperform the state-of-the-art implementation (in the passive-adversary setting) by Kolesnikov et al. (CCS 2017), both in terms of latency and communication cost.

Homomorphic encryption has become a promising solution for protecting the privacy of computations on sensitive data. However, existing homomorphic encryption pipelines do not guarantee the correctness of the computation result in the presence of a malicious adversary. In this poster, we present two encodings compatible with state-of-the-art fully homomorphic encryption schemes that enable practical client-verification of homomorphic computations, while enabling all the operations required for modern privacy-preserving analytics. Based on these encodings, we introduce a ready-to-use library for the verification of any homomorphic operation executed over encrypted data. We demonstrate its practicality for various applications and, in particular, we show that it enables verifiability of some homomorphic analytics with less than 3 times overhead compared to the homomorphic encryption baseline.

Multiparty fully homomorphic encryption (MFHE) schemes enable multiple parties to efficiently compute functions on their sensitive data while retaining confidentiality. However, existing MFHE schemes guarantee data confidentiality and the correctness of the computation result only against honest-but-curious adversaries. In this work, we provide the first practical construction that enables the verification of MFHE operations in zero-knowledge, protecting MFHE from malicious adversaries. Our solution relies on a combination of lattice-based commitment schemes and proof systems which we adapt to support both modern FHE schemes and their implementation optimizations. We implement our construction in PELTA. Our experimental evaluation shows that PELTA is one to two orders of magnitude faster than existing techniques in the literature.

Abstract Tree-based models are among the most efficient machine learning techniques for data mining nowadays due to their accuracy, interpretability, and simplicity. The recent orthogonal needs for more data and privacy protection call for collaborative privacy-preserving solutions. In this work, we survey the literature on distributed and privacy-preserving training of tree-based models and we systematize its knowledge based on four axes: the learning algorithm, the collaborative model, the protection mechanism, and the threat model. We use this to identify the strengths and limitations of these works and provide for the first time a framework analyzing the information leakage occurring in distributed tree-based model learning.