Intro to Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs)
Harshal Shah
BSidesSF 2025 — Here Be Dragons · Day 2 · Main
Harshal Shah, a senior software engineer, delivered a practical primer on Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) — a family of cryptographic techniques including Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) that allow computation on data without ever exposing the underlying plaintext. These technologies, once considered purely academic, are already deployed by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others, and are increasingly relevant to organizations navigating data collaboration under regulatory constraints like GDPR. ---
AI review
A technically correct introduction to FHE and MPC that covers the concepts accessibly without going anywhere near deep enough for a security practitioner audience. The MPC-based cryptocurrency key custody and the FHE breach-checking examples are the only production-grounded moments. Everything else is intro-level cryptography with good production values.