Privacy Enhancing Technologies (WS 2023/24)

Course Number 705054 | Wintersemester 2023/24

Content

The lecture Privacy Enhancing Technologies overviews modern cryptographic and non-cryptographic methods to increase privacy.
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves.
This lecture covers basic privacy principles and mechanisms to increase a user’s privacy. We will take a closer look at building blocks that provide privacy, including:
  • Leakage of aggregate Data and Database recovery
  • Differential Privacy and K-anonymity
  • Multiparty Computation protocols
  • (Fully) Homomorphic Encryption
  • Privacy-Preserving machine learning
  • Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions
  • Regulation on privacy
  • Blockchains
  • TOR, traffic analysis
  • Zero Knowledge Proofs
Keep in touch on Discord (channel #pets).

Material

Date Lecture 14:00–16:00 (HS i1) Who Practicals 16:00–16:45 (HS i1)
02.10.2023 L1 – Intro, Overview CR
09.10.2023 L2 – Statistics, Leakage of aggregate Data, Database recovery FM T1 handout, T1 Slides
16.10.2023 L3 – Differential Privacy and K-anonymity FM
23.10.2023 L4 – Secure Multi-Party Computation protocols FS
30.10.2023 GL1 – Legal Implications of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies by David Bierbauer
06.11.2023 L5 – (Fully) Homomorphic Encryption protocols FS T2 handout, T2 Slides
13.11.2023 L6 – Privacy Regulations LH
20.11.2023 L7 – Practical aspects of HE/MPC FS
27.11.2023 L8 – Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning FS
04.12.2023 L09 – Blockchains CR T3 handout, T3 slides
11.12.2023 L10 – Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions LH
18.12.2023 L11 – TOR and traffic analysis FS
08.01.2023 L12 – Zero-Knowledge Proofs (for Blockchain and more) CR
15.01.2024 Week of Assignment Interviews
22.01.2024 GL2 – Use-cases of Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Daniel Kales
29.01.2024 VO Exam (Example Questions)

Practicals

Task Kick-off (16:00) Deadline (23:59, git tag) Material
T1 09.10.2023 03.11.2023
T2 06.11.2023 08.12.2023
T3 04.12.2023 12.01.2024

NOTE: The deadline for T2 has been extend to the 8th of December (was previously December 1).

Group registration deadline: 09.10.2023 (23:59)

Administrative Information

Lecture Exams (VO)

The VO exam is a written exam.
Please find the exam dates and registration in TUGRAZonline.

Practicals (KU)

In the practicals, you implement small projects related to the topics discussed in the lectures. The practicals consist of 3 assignments T1, T2, T3 solved in teams of 2 students.

You can earn a total of 100 points; the grading scheme is shown in the table below.

You will get a grade as soon as you hand in a solution to T1 by adding a git tag. Groups that do not hand in anything for T1 will not be given a grade and will be unregistered from the course. Note that handing in T1 (even an empty solution) is the only condition for “getting a grade”.

Grade 5 4 3 2 1
Min. Points < 50 ≥ 50 ≥62.5 ≥ 75 ≥ 87.5 of 100

Teams and Team Registration

The KU is done in teams of 2 students. You can use the IAIK discord, channel #pets to find team members. You then register your team at the TeachCenter.

Submission

You are given access to a git repository in our teaching git, where you have to push your submission. The required content is discussed in the Kick-Off lectures.

You must mark your final submission by tagging it in git. The tag label starts with the assignment (T1, T2, T3), followed by a dash and a number. As an example, T1-1 is the label for the first assignment. As tags cannot be deleted, you may always update your final submission by increasing the appended number: T1-2, T1-3, etc. In the end, the tag with the highest number before the deadline counts.

Your submissions will be tested automatically by our test system. Thus, you need to respect and meet the file naming constraints of the individual assignments. Otherwise, the tests will all fail, and you will receive 0 points for the assignment.

After the hand-in of the last task, there will be a team interview for all 3 tasks. There, both team members need to be able to explain their solution to each assignment.

Points of Communication

Please use the following methods for communication:

Lecturers