Digital ticketing systems typically offer ticket purchase, refund, validation, and, optionally, anonymity of users. However, it would be interesting for users to transfer their tickets, as is currently done with physical tickets. We propose Applause, a ticketing system allowing the purchase, refund, validation, and transfer of tickets based on trusted authority, while guaranteeing the anonymity of users, as long as the used payment method provides anonymity. To study its security, we formalise the security of the transferable E-Ticket scheme in the game-based paradigm. We prove the security of Applause computationally in the standard model and symbolically using the protocol verifier ProVerif. Applause relies on standard cryptographic primitives, rendering our construction efficient and scalable, as shown by a proof-of-concept. In order to obtain Spotlight, an auditable version, proved to be secure, users will remain anonymous except for a trusted third party, which will be able to disclose their identity in the event of a disaster.

We tackle the problem of secure cumulative reward maximization in multi-armed bandits in a cross-silo federated learning setting. Under the orchestration of a central server, each data owner participating at the cumulative reward computation has the guarantee that its raw data is not seen by some other participant. We rely on cryptographic schemes and propose SAMBA, a generic framework for Secure federAted Multi-armed BAndits. We show that SAMBA returns the same cumulative reward as the non-secure versions of bandit algorithms, while satisfying formally proven security properties. We also show that the overhead due to cryptographic primitives is linear in the size of the input, which is confirmed by our implementation.

The federated learning paradigm allows several data owners to contribute to a machine learning task without exposing their potentially sensitive data. We focus on cumulative reward maximization in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), a classical reinforcement learning model for decision making under uncertainty. We demonstrate Samba, a generic framework for Secure federAted Multi-armed BAndits. The demonstration platform is a Web interface that simulates the distributed components of Samba, and which helps the data scientist to configure the end-to-end workflow of deploying a federated MAB algorithm. The user-friendly interface of Samba, allows the users to examine the interaction between three key dimensions of federated MAB: cumulative reward, computation time, and security guarantees. We demonstrate Samba with two real-world datasets: Google Local Reviews and Steam Video Game.

The multi-armed bandit is a reinforcement learning model where a learning agent repeatedly chooses an action (pull a bandit arm) and the environment responds with a stochastic outcome (reward) coming from an unknown distribution associated with the chosen arm. Bandits have a wide-range of application such as Web recommendation systems. We address the cumulative reward maximization problem in a secure federated learning setting, where multiple data owners keep their data stored locally and collaborate under the coordination of a central orchestration server. We rely on cryptographic schemes and propose Samba, a generic framework for Secure federAted Multi-armed BAndits. Each data owner has data associated to a bandit arm and the bandit algorithm has to sequentially select which data owner is solicited at each time step. We instantiate Samba for five bandit algorithms. We show that Samba returns the same cumulative reward as the nonsecure versions of bandit algorithms, while satisfying formally proven security properties. We also show that the overhead due to cryptographic primitives is linear in the size of the input, which is confirmed by our proof-of-concept implementation.