Select-Then-Compute: Encrypted Label Selection and Analytics over Distributed Datasets using FHE
Nirajan Koirala
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026 · Day 1 · Applied Cryptography
This talk presents a novel cryptographic protocol called **Select-Then-Compute** that enables privacy-preserving label selection and analytics across distributed, encrypted datasets using **Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)**. The protocol addresses a critical gap in the current landscape of privacy-preserving computation: the ability to query encrypted ID-label pairs across multiple data owners, select matching labels, and perform downstream analytics -- all without decrypting any data at any point in the pipeline.
AI review
A solid applied cryptography paper that introduces a unified FHE-based protocol for encrypted label selection and analytics over distributed datasets. The VAF primitives and slot-wise windowing are technically competent improvements over prior work, achieving 27x latency speedups. However, from an offensive security perspective, this is pure defensive crypto plumbing with no exploit research, no vulnerability analysis, and no adversarial insight.