Privacy-preserving techniques such as secure multi-party computation and related areas have matured over the last decades in terms of their speed, accessibility, and usability. However, their propagation into everyday user products continues to be slow. Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) remain largely inaccessible to end users and small or non-profit organizations, and a large unexplored potential remains.

Researchers in the community have applied PETs to many application domains and have demonstrated that it is possible to contribute to solving large global challenges such as fighting crime, advancing medical research and patient treatment, strengthening sustainability efforts, reducing gender and race disparities, and much more. In all of this, the fact that certain information remains confidential is crucial to enabling the functionality which otherwise would not be feasible to carry out. Thus, applied cryptography enables us to achieve what we could not do before using conventional mechanisms and improve individuals’ wellbeing.

This Dagstuhl Seminar aims to bring together researchers, whose technical work has contributed to addressing societal challenges, and their allies. We want to share experiences, discuss ideas, and get inspired to do more together in the future.

We envision talks and sessions that (i) share experience and (ii) explore future directions and applications. Sample topics in which the seminar participants have experience with include:

• Developing solutions for privacy-preserving donor organ match and exchange
• Designing a privacy-respecting humanitarian aid distribution system
• Developing privacy-preserving verification of compliance with sustainability practices
• Designing an effective (cross-institution) money laundering detection system

and more. The participants will share their experience with

• Formulating the problem and problem-specific requirements
• Forming collaboration with domain experts
• Making design decisions and developing a solution and
• Overcoming deployment roadblocks.

The sessions that discuss future directions and applications will seek new applications to explore, discuss the roadblocks to the adoption of applications that utilize PETs, and work toward designs that overcome the roadblocks.

Creative Commons BY 4.0

Marina Blanton and Liina Kamm