Description:
The course will describe different privacy-preservation techniques - their constructions, the guarantees they do or do not give, the prerequisites of their use in different applications and processes. The technologies will described by three broad application categories: protecting the privacy of inter-entity communication, privacy-preserving management of rights and credentials, and privacy-preserving data processing. The first category encompasses techniques like encryption, onion routing, or anonymous e-mail. The second category contains anonymous credentials, group and ring signatures. Examples of the technologies from the third category are anonymization and pseudonymization of data, differential privacy, and data clustering. We will also consider primitives useful for techniques of several categories, including privacy-preserving computations, zero-knowledge proofs, or blind signatures.
Beside the description of different privacy-preservation techniques, we also describe how to select and use them to secure existing or to-be-designed information systems.
Learning outcomes:
Students that have passed the course will be able to:
- Understand technological threats to privacy, knowing in which scenarios and to which kind of data they do apply, and how strongly.
- Analyze the privacy risks of using different information systems, as well as the risks stemming from one's own sharing of information.
- Explain the details of different privacy preservation techniques.
- Classify different privacy preservation techniques in terms of their applicability, efficiency and cost (in terms of computational and organizational efforts necessary to apply them, as well as the loss of utility).
- Choose a good set of privacy-preservation technologies in order to reduce the leaks in a new or an existing information system.
- While designing an information system, apply privacy-by-design principles to define the major components of the system in a way that makes the leaks easy to reduce.
