The Workshop on Language Support for Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) are necessary when untrusted platforms compute on sensitive data, for example in a distributed setting or in cloud computing. Cryptography offers a rich set of PETs for such privacy-preserving computations, including secure multi-party computation (SMC) and zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols. These systems enable distrusting parties to collectively compute over their private inputs without revealing their data to the other parties. With the wide availability of distributed systems, social media, and cloud computing, there is a pressing need to make these technologies usable in practice. A key step towards practicality is the ability to compile from high-level languages, like C, into cryptographic protocols. Such cryptographic compilers have only recently begun to emerge, and they stand to benefit from decades of research in programming languages, compiler construction, and program verification. We believe that the concepts, methodologies, and tools developed in these areas of research can help to make cryptographic PETs practically available. PETShop is located at the crossroads of security, programming languages, compiler construction, and program verification and aims to bring together researchers from these different communities to exchange ideas and research results to improve the practicality of state of the art cryptographic PETs. The one-day workshop will be a combination of invited talks, tutorials, tool presentations, and informal presentations. The workshop solicits short/work-in-progress/position-papers. Submitted papers must be in ACM double-column format with at most 2 pages, including bibliography. A paper submitted to this workshop must not be in parallel submission to any other journal, magazine, conference or workshop with proceedings. It is up to the authors to decide whether a submission should be anonymous.