Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs): A Brief Guide

Privacy-enhancing technologies, or PETs, are tools designed to protect and preserve user privacy in a world where more platforms process our personal information than ever before. These technologies employ different methods to safeguard private data, preventing unauthorized access and maintaining anonymity.

Put simply, you can think of them as a shield against breaches, surveillance and invasive data collection practices.

Popular Examples of PETs

PETs come in various forms, each serving a distinct purpose in fortifying our digital privacy.  Four pivotal PETs have reshaped the landscape of online security and personal data protection:

Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) enable one party to prove to another that a piece of data is true or correct without revealing the information itself. They use a series of interactions or a string of information to validate the data, offering a new level of privacy to transactions involving confidential information. Zero-Knowledge Proofs are used to securely vote, share health care record information, and provide salary ranges for mortgage loans.

While these allow for secure verification without exposing sensitive data, they are often complex to implement and are not suitable for all types of data or use cases. They require significant computational power for setup and verification, and they often require multiple rounds of interaction, which can be a hurdle for large-scale applications in the cloud.

Differential Privacy

Operating on the principle of injecting noise into datasets, differential privacy shields individual data points while still allowing data analysis. It safeguards privacy by preventing the identification of specific individuals within a dataset, maintaining anonymity. Differential privacy is applied in scenarios like health care research, where researchers can analyze aggregated data to derive valuable insights without compromising individual privacy, ensuring anonymity while studying trends and behavioral or reaction patterns.

This method ensures anonymity in datasets, but it also introduces a trade-off between privacy and accuracy. The ‘noise’ added to protect individual data points can sometimes lead to less accurate results, especially in smaller datasets. This makes it less ideal for situations where precision is critical. Differential privacy also offers no real guarantees that real data will always be safeguarded, and it is therefore vulnerable to slow leaks.

Confidential Computing

Confidential Computing addresses the need to safeguard sensitive information while actively processing it by enabling data processing within a secure environment, known as a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). This technology is particularly valuable in cloud computing, where it ensures the confidentiality and integrity of data throughout its lifecycle, providing assurance that data remains protected during processing even from the cloud providers.

Although Confidential Computing offers robust protection for data in use, its implementation can be complex and resource-intensive. The necessity for specialized hardware and software to establish and maintain secure environments can result in increased costs and complexity. Additionally, Confidential Computing does not inherently protect against all types of vulnerabilities, such as side-channel attacks. Consequently, its application may be limited in situations where the required infrastructure is not readily available, where the operational overheads are not justified by the benefits, or in use cases where the data security must be impregnable.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)

This revolutionary technology allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without decrypting it first. FHE is most practical in cloud computing, which, in turn, affects many of the aforementioned examples. By allowing data analysis to run on encrypted data, it is especially important for confidential analysis in industries like defense, healthcare, and financial services.

Historically, the primary limitation of FHE has been its computational intensity, making it impractical for large-scale use. However, with Chain Reaction’s 3PU™ privacy processor, FHE is becoming a more viable option, offering unparalleled data privacy without compromising on functionality.

These PETs operate on diverse principles, from cryptographic techniques to secure processing areas, all with the common goal of preserving user privacy and data integrity in an increasingly interconnected world.

PETs and Your Personal Data

With the recent spotlight on data privacy concerns, major players like Meta (formerly Facebook) have come under scrutiny for their handling of personal data. Meta’s ad-targeting algorithms rely on user data, raising concerns about privacy infringement. While the company claims to use this data in an anonymized manner, there have been instances of breaches and mismanagement.

As a response, Meta has already shifted toward prioritizing research about secure FHE, multi-party computation, on-device learning, and differential privacy as part of its content marketing strategy.

The use of personal data for targeted advertising underscores the vulnerability of user information in the digital space. As concerns about data misuse persist, it is imperative to explore robust solutions that ensure data confidentiality without compromising functionality.

One promising solution in this landscape we have already mentioned is FHE. Currently, Meta relies on extensive user data to power its targeted advertising, which involves analyzing and processing user information to match ads with user preferences. By implementing FHE, companies like Meta could perform complex data operations while preserving user privacy. The confidential data would remain encrypted throughout the entire analysis process, ensuring that user privacy is preserved at all stages of ad targeting.

Implementing FHE at Scale Requires a New Approach

While Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has always been a promising technology, its widespread adoption has been slowed by practical challenges, primarily in computational efficiency. Historically, the computational resources needed to protect your personal data, let alone Meta’s datasets, have simply made it impossible to use FHE on a massive scale.

At Chain Reaction, we understand these challenges and are committed to overcoming them. Our pioneering 3PU™ privacy processor is a game changer in this arena. This advanced processor is specifically designed to handle the intense computational demands of FHE, enabling it to process data at speeds and at a scale previously unattainable.

The 3PU™ technology revolutionizes how data is processed. By leveraging cutting-edge algorithms and hardware optimizations, it dramatically reduces the time and resources required to perform complex calculations on encrypted data. This means that tasks that were once deemed too resource-intensive for FHE are now not only possible but efficient and practical.