Privacy and secrecy: a general analysis

Now, for my second major post, I decided to take on something different — rather than an overview of a specific project, I’ll be writing up more of a conceptual overview of concepts very near and dear to my heart: the concepts of privacy and secrecy, and how they relate to various terminologies becoming more and more popular: namely: Zero Knowledge proofs, ZKSNARKs, Trusted Execution Environments, and Multi-party computation (if there is room at the end of the article, I may dip into more exotic systems like Homomorphic encryption and Indistinguishability obfuscation — but I suspect that will confuse, not edify). Before getting into the meat of the project, I will say that for this article specifically I will, at the request of one of the people promoting it, not be naming any specific projects for the bulk of the article. I should also note that this article will be read by representatives of both the Enigma and Keep projects for technical correctness, and I will make clear where contentful changes by either party are suggested to keep potential conflicts of interest clear.

Outline:

Part I: Definitions:

Before we get into the individual techniques for privacy and secrecy, we will first take some time out to establish definitions for the terms ‘privacy’ and ‘secrecy’, as well as the distinction between data, transactional, and computational privacy/secrecy, and the difference between preservation and creation of security properties. Some may contend that everyone knows what the relevant…