Awesome PETs

A curated list of resources for privacy-enhancing technologies

Contents

• General
• Differential Privacy
• Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
• Homomorphic Encryption
• Secure Multiparty Computation
• Synthetic Data
• Zero-knowledge Proofs and zk-SNARKs
• Privacy-Preserving Hardware

General

General resources about PETs and related concepts

Articles

• Privacy Enhancing Technologies: An Introduction for Technologists - Overview of PETs from Katharine Jarmul, the author of Practical Data Privacy.

Books

• Practical Data Privacy - An overview of privacy and how to apply it in technical systems and organizations. Includes introductions to various PETs.

• Real World Cryptography - The majority of the book is an introduction to cryptography and cryptographic applications with additional material covering PETs such as multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and cryptographic hardware.

Blogs

• OpenMined Blog - Blog of the open-source group OpenMined with several posts on PETs and privacy tech.

Papers

• Privacy enhancing technologies: Adoption guide - A white paper and interactive tool on adopting PETs for projects provided by the UK government's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.

• The United Nations Guide on Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Official Statistics

Podcasts

• Shifting Privacy Left - Podcast hosted by privacy and legal expert Debra J Farber featuring interviews and discussions with various privacy and PETs experts.

Differential Privacy

See the Awesome Differential Privacy List (github: menisadi/awesome-differential-privacy).

Organizations

• DifferentialPrivacy.org - A website with resources curated by the DP research community. It includes several courses, videos, surveys, and links to other resources.

• OpenDP - Open-source group developing DP tools.

Blogs

• NIST Differential Privacy Blog Series - A blog series from NIST covering topics from introductory concepts to deploying DP-based applications.

• A friendly, non-technical introduction to differential privacy - A useful series of posts and visualizations introducing DP and related concepts from Damien Desfontaines, a.k.a. Ted, a research scientist at Tumult Labs.

Books

• The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy - Free, online book focused on DP principles and theory

• Programming Differential Privacy - Free, online book focused on teaching DP principles through Python code examples

• Hands-On Differential Privacy - An O'Reilly book analyzing practical DP methods with a focus on using the OpenDP library

Open-Source Tools

• OpenDP - Python bindings for OpenDP's Rust-based framework.

Papers

• Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees - NIST publication providing an overview of DP with a focus on practical considerations and common pitfalls when using DP in practice.

• Differential Privacy: A Primer for a Non-Technical Audience - In-depth yet accessible overview of DP.

• Issues Encountered Deploying Differential Privacy - Review of deployment and usage of DP for the 2020 United States population census.

• Differential Privacy & the 2020 U.S. Census Reading List - Collection of writings and presentations reviewing the usage of DP in the 2020 U.S. Census.

Videos

• Protecting Privacy with MATH - Overview of DP and related concepts by the MinutePhysics channel in collaboration with the US Census Bureau.

Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

Note: Federated learning by itself does not guarantee data privacy, but when used in combination with other PETs it can become privacy-preserving.

There are several different Awesome lists for federated learning, but this one seems to be the most popular. Note that it's federated learning generally, not just PPFL: https://github.com/innovation-cat/Awesome-Federated-Machine-Learning

Papers

• Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data - Paper that introduced the popular FedAvg algorithm

Open-Source Tools

• APPFL - Advanced Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning built my Argonne National Labs aimed at high-performance computing applications. Includes differential-privacy and the ability to incorporate other PETs

• FedML - Github Repository: https://github.com/fedml-ai/fedml

• Flower - A unified FL framework available in multiple languages. Flower does not include privacy preservation itself, but is intended to be used in conjunction with other ML and PPML frameworks.

• OpenFL - Open-source FL framework hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Homomorphic Encryption

See the Awesome Homomorphic Encryption List (github: jonaschn/awesome-he).

Organizations

• [https://homomorphicencryption.org/](Homomorphic Encryption Standardization) - A body consisting of industry, government, and academic members advocating for standardization of HE.

Blogs

• A High-Level Technical Overview of Fully Homomorphic Encryption - Great overview of FHE from Jeremy Kun's Math ∩ Programming blog

Secure Multiparty Computation

See the Awesome MPC List (github: rdragos/awesome-mpc).

Organizations

• MPC Alliance - Industry group devoted to increasing adoption of MPC. Includes links to several books and videos.

Videos

• Multiparty Computation - Computational Thinking - 5 minute intro on MPC and secret sharing examples and concepts

Synthetic Data

Tools

DataSynthesizer - A Python-based tool for generating differentally-private synthetic data

Zero-knowledge Proofs and zk-SNARKs

See the Awesome Zero Knowledge Proofs List (github: https://github.com/matter-labs/awesome-zero-knowledge-proofs)

Organizations

• ZKProof - An open-industry academic initiative seeking to develop standards for ZKPs. The organization also conducts workshops, publishes research, educational material, etc.

Blogs and Tutorials

• Zero Knowledge What? An Introduction to Zero Knowledge - A technical introduction (including basic Python examples) from Stanford's Code the Change guides.

• Zero-Knowledge: a tutorial by Oded Goldreich - A tutorial covering introductory and advanced topics in Zero-knowledge proofs

Papers

• The knowledge complexity of interactive proof-systems - The original paper introducing zero-knowledge proofs

• A physical zero-knowledge object-comparison system for nuclear warhead verification - A proposed mechanism to use ZKPs for nuclear armament reduction

• Why and How zk-SNARK Works - Good overview of the building blocks that zk-SNARKs are composed of

Videos

• Zero Knowledge Proofs - Computational Thinking - 9 minute intro on ZKP examples and concepts

Privacy-preserving Hardware

Blogs

• State of the Future - Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Confidential Computing - Overview from a VC blog on what trusted-execution environments are and how they enable privacy-preserving, collaborative computing

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