[Talk] Applications of MP-FHE for Vulnerable Communities

Coming out of a week in Bangkok, Thailand, getting deep in the weeds on emerging cryptographic techniques at Devcon 2024, thanks to the support of 0xPARC sponsoring me as a Research Fellow.

Some highlights to note for me include:

• learning more and nerding out about verifiable networks, selective disclosure, and indistinguishable obfuscation — topics I expect to be major areas of exploration in this space moving forward

  • I’m curious how indistinguishable obfuscation and fully homomorphic encryption can be combined to create systems where encrypted data is run on encrypted programs, and what the downstream implications of this will be.

• exploring ideas of cryptographic consent mechanisms (perhaps another framing for selective disclosure?)

• having a space to really be able to share my work and research to a receptive audience, especially around community applications for zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), multi-party computation (MPC), and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)

I also gave a talk on Applications of MP-FHE for Vulnerable Communities, as a part of the session on “Multi-Party Fully Homomorphic Encryption (MP-FHE) in Practice”: (link to slides here if you’d like to see my notes!)

I’ve also been talking with some friends about putting together a residency around community privacy, hopefully for early next year, where we can bring together privacy and cryptography builders with community workers into collaborating in shared space — very excited about this!

Other highlights on this trip: visiting my friend’s mom in Chiang Mai, riding around on the back of scooters, eating delicious seafood and fruit, getting massages, and tapping into the local queer scene and music scene.

Special thanks to my friends Ying Tong, Janabel, Aayush, Vivek, Micah, Rithikha, Seb, Raymond, Naia, Grjte, and Jay for all the inspiring and though-provoking conversations this week. I’ve learned so much and feel so grateful to be in community with others who are also kind, curious, and excited about building out new infrastructure with these emerging tools.