Privacy Enhancing Technologies (WS 2024/25)

Course Number 705054 | Wintersemester 2024/25

Lecturers

Christian Rechberger

Lena Heimberger

Fredrik Meisingseth

Fabian Schmid

Shibam Mukherjee

Teaching Assistants

Sebastian Fellner

Table of Content

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
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

You can find the individual slides via the links below and the collection here.

Date	Lecture 14:00–16:00 (HS i1)	Who	Practicals 16:00–16:45 (HS i1)
07.10.2024	L1 – Intro, Overview	CR
14.10.2024	L2 – Reconstruction Attacks	FM	T1 handout
21.10.2024	L3 – Differential Privacy	FM
28.10.2024	L4 – Secure Multi-Party Computation protocols	FS	T1 Q&A
04.11.2024	L5 – (Fully) Homomorphic Encryption protocols	FS	T1 Q&A
11.11.2024	L6 – Practical aspects of HE/MPC	FS	T2 handout
18.11.2024	L7 – Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning	FS	Talk: SCT auditing in practice by LH
25.11.2024	GL1 - Legal Implications of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies by David Bierbauer		T2 Q&A
02.12.2024	L8 – TOR and traffic analysis	LH	T2 Q&A
09.12.2024	L9 – Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions	LH	T3 handout
16.12.2024	L10 – Privacy Regulations	LH	T3 Q&A
13.01.2025	L11 – Blockchains	CR	T3 Q&A
20.01.2025	L12 – Zero-Knowledge Proofs (for Blockchain and more)	CR
27.01.2025	GL2 - Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Plonkish Proofs & Use Cases		Week of Assignment Interviews

Practicals

Task	Kick-off (16:00)	Deadline (23:59, git tag)
T1	14.10.2024	08.11.2024
T2	11.11.2024	06.12.2024
T3	09.12.2024	17.01.2025

Group registration deadline: 14.10.2024 (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 when 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. 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. Ultimately, the tag with the highest number before the deadline counts. Our test system will test your submissions automatically. Thus, you must 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 three tasks. There, both team members need to be able to explain their solution to each assignment.