Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Course Number 705054 | Wintersemester 2020/21

The lecture Privacy Enhancing Technologies gives an overview of modern cryptographic and non-cryptographic methods to increase privacy.

Content

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves. This lecture covers basic principles of privacy and mechanisms to increase a user's privacy. We will take a closer look at building blocks that provide privacy, including:
  • Database recovery
  • Differential Privacy and k-anonymity
  • TOR and traffic analysis
  • Anonymous Credentials and Identification
  • MPC protocols
  • (Fully) Homomorphic Encryption
  • Private Information Retrieval
  • Zero Knowledge Proofs
  • Blockchains

COVID-19 Info

All lectures and exercises are conducted virtually this year. KU will also be virtual. You can watch online contents live. For most contents, recordings will be available afterwards. You will receive the relevant URLs by email, so please monitor your inbox. As long as the TU Graz rules permit (traffic light green, yellow, orange), at least the first two final VO exams will remain written, conducted in small groups and according to the TU Graz guidelines for on-campus exams. In case you are reluctant or unable to participate in an on-campus exam (e.g., risk group), contact pets@iaik.tugraz.at to arrange a virtual oral exam via WebEx. In case of a red traffic light during the main exam time (early February 2021), these dates will be converted to virtual written exams. You can find upcoming exam dates in TUGRAZonline. If no upcoming dates are listed, ask us! Keep in touch on Discord (channel #pets).

Material

Date Who Lecture 14:00–16:00 Practicals 16:00–16:45
05.10.2020 CR L1 – Intro, Overview
12.10.2020 CR L2 – Database recovery, Differential Privacy
19.10.2020 CR - T1 Kickoff
09.11.2020 MS L4 – Tor and Traffic Analysis
16.11.2020 MS L5 – Anonymous Credentials and Identification
23.11.2020 DK L6 - MPC protocols
30.11.2020 RW L7 – Homomorphic Encryption T2 Kickoff
07.12.2020 DK L8 – HE/MPC use cases
14.12.2020 RW L9 – Secure Storage/Access Privacy T3 Kickoff
11.01.2021 CR L10 – Blockchain, (additional TuGCoin Slides)
18.01.2021 CR L11 – ZKP (for BC and more)
25.01.2021 L12 - Outro
01.02.2021 VO Exam

Practicals

Task Kick-off (16:00) Questions (16:00) Deadline (13:59, git tag) Material
T1 19.10.2020 tba 23.11.2020 assignment, upstream
T2 30.11.2020 tba 25.01.2021 assignment, upstream
T3 14.12.2020 tba 25.01.2021 assignment, upstream

Group registration deadline: 16.10.2020 (23:59)

Administrative Information

Lecture Exams (VO)

The VO exam is a written exam (for the first 2 dates each year, otherwise contact us for an oral exam any time). See above for COVID-19 plans. 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-groupsearch to find team members. You then register your team at https://stics.iaik.tugraz.at. You can find a detailed tutorial at Guide to STicS.

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 file naming constraints of the individual assignments. Otherwise, the tests will all fail and you will receive 0 points for the assignment.
After hand-in of the last task, there will be a team interview for all 3 tasks with an assigned teaching assistant. There, both team members need to be able to explain your solution of each assignment.

Points of Communication

Please use the following methods for communication:

Lecturers

Christian Rechberger
Christian
Rechberger

Professor

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Lena Heimberger
Lena
Heimberger

PhD Student

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