A Deep Dive into PETs Privacy Enhancing Technology | SheFi Summit Bangkok

Transcript

[Music] hi everyone I'm Steph I lead developer relations at Nilan and I'm also oceans 404 on Twitter so this is a deep dive into pets I have two pets at home Obie and Teddy uh but sadly we're not talking about them today we're actually going to be talking about privacy enhancing Technologies and I know there's going to be a lot of acronyms in this talk so I had to add a SpongeBob medium to make this more fun because if SpongeBob's there it has to be great right so first of all I I want to make this easier by telling you I promise you've already used a pet these are two that I used in

middle school I used Pig Latin to conceal things for my little sister when my friends came over um we would talk in Pig Latin about boys so that she wouldn't know what we were talking about I have also used a Caesar Cipher when passing notes in class um the Caesar Cipher is a privacy enhancing technology where you shift the letters three back or however many back to create secret messages that you can share with your friends and I'm sure all of you have used these and others as well but the problem with these and simpler pets is that simple privacy doesn't cut it today when I asked chat GPT to decode the Hello message that I wrote with the Caesar Cipher it was able to do it in Mill seconds so today we have smarter

adversaries including AI quantum Computing all different types of things that can way more easily break encryption and we also have more complex data needs so we need to be able to keep the data safe while we're using it which gets more complicated with large sets of data and also when you have to manage data that you share with your friends and other people in your internet world and the stakes have never been higher honestly when I think about how important privacy is things start to feel a little bit like a Black Mirror episode where if things go wrong it could literally ruin lives as Secrets leak as your personal data gets out so now is the time to care about privacy more than ever before so these are some

considerations that we have to take when designing modern pets or pets the first thing we want to be able to do is use data while protecting it so even if something is encrypted or protected we might want to use it to do different things the second thing we need to do is prove the data is correct um and authenticated without actually revealing it so both of these things can be done with pets and math basically and I had to throw this meme in because I don't know about you but when it comes to cryptography there's so many acronyms and this is up there to make it a little bit less scary as we dive into each of these different types of pets so the first one I want to talk about is zero

knowledge proofs ZK key so the tldr or the mitochondria is the PowerHouse of the cell version of zkp is that it allows you to prove something without revealing the underlying data so the classic example is um if you have your birthday and you know your birthday you can prove things about your age without revealing your actual birthday and that's done with provs and verifiers and the cool thing about zkp is it's already being used by projects that you know and we'll likely run into at events all week so the first one I thought about was ZK sync which is an L2 that's using zero knowledge proofs to bundle transactions so that you only have to PO post one

proof on ethereum um and that cheapens things and makes things a lot faster Aztec is using zkp to create private transactions so I can send my friend money and they know that I've sent them the right amount and that could be done for bills or all kinds of things where maybe we don't want to know the exact amount of money that's being sent on the blockchain but we want to prove that it has actually been sent into the correct account and then provado ID shout out to Evan who just did an amazing panel provado is using zkp to create attestations to prove any types of things so you can literally prove things about your birthday uh whether you attended this event literally anything and their SDK is awesome so highly recommend checking that out if you're a

developer the next pet I want to talk about is MPC multi-party computation so this is when you can distribute computation on data that you can't see but still work with it the example that I like to think of for MPC is voting if all of us cast a private vote how do I count all the votes and figure out who the election winner is this is a perfect time to use MPC um so I work at neillian and we're using MPC in our pet net today uh and I'll talk more about that later but MPC is one of the pets that we're most excited about it is also using MPC to create wallets that have all of the keys distributed so that you can recover them with social login and then base AI

agents also use MPC to split up I believe it's private keys so that if an AI agent has a split private key it takes multiple agents in consensus in order for them to do something on chain so that's how these companies use MPC the next one is FHA fully homomorphic encryption so this is similar to MPC but instead of having lots of different parties doing things one party can directly compute on encrypted data so Zama is really leading the charge in fhd right now they have awesome research and development and tons of libraries that make this a lot friendlier for developers inco uh does this onchain and Phoenix also has a blockchain that

incorporates fhe and then last but not least is tees which are trusted execution environments these work by creating completely isolated environments in hardware and then protecting that Hardware so that none of the secrets can leak out so secret network has um tees integrated into their Network and we actually heard some pretty exciting news this week from anthropic who are partnering um to basically use tees on AI agents so that's pretty interesting and it's cool to see a web 2 company kind of getting into this space so they're also using tees but when it comes to all of these different pets there's different

limitations and kind of pain points to consider so with zkp it can be really hard to audit and it's limited to just things that you can prove for MPC it requires lots of different people to be online at the same time so that we can contribute shares to the computation for FHA the limiting factor is just speed the computation can be really slow and then for tees since they're Hardware dependent you have to trust the hardware provider and that's just something that not everyone can depend on so those are different limitations so which one should you choose and maybe the obvious answer is none of them but also all of them all of them have reasons to choose

them and also reasons that maybe you wouldn't so as a developer or um someone who's looking into the pets you'll want to look at all of them and decide based on your use case which one works for you and I mentioned before I work at Nilan and at Nilan we're building a pet net uh and the pet net combines pets all of the ones that I talked to you about before into one system where you can kind of pick and choose what's best for your use case so this is really exciting to me as a developer because I'm someone that didn't study cryptography or math but I love to be able to implement things when I see them so if I see is I don't need to know everything about them in order to implement them to my solution if

there's something like a pet net which combines everything and lets me pick and choose so very excited about everything we're building at million and you can learn more about our project uh by going to our docs docs. nan.com we also have an AI chat bot on the side where you can directly talk to it ask questions about pets um and it's pretty good it'll give you answers to anything you want to know or you can come talk to me afterwards and the last thing I wanted to mention is that we're doing a pretty cool activation all week at Devcon uh we're giving out free tuck tuck rides so if you see a blue neillian tuck tuck you can take it completely for free just show it where you want to go so like whatever Side Event you're going to next

and it'll take you directly there for free a useful web 3 infra we're excited about it but that's everything for me thank you ink you T