Visiting Researcher Talk: Dr Marcel Keller | 15 Sept 2025
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15 Sep 2025
03.00 PM - 04.00 PM
Current Students, Industry/Academic Partners
Talk Title
MP-SPDZ: A versatile framework for multi-party computation
Speaker
Dr Marcell Keller
About the Speaker
Marcel Keller is a senior research scientist with CSIRO's Data61, a research unit of Australia's national science agency. After completing his PhD with Ivan Damgård at Aarhus University, he spent a few years at the University of Bristol under the supervision
of Nigel Smart. There, he started working on an implementation of multi-party computation that eventually would form the basis of MP-SPDZ, an open-source project used by researchers all over the world.
Talk descriptionMulti-party computation is a technology that allows computation on distributed data without the parties having to reveal their inputs to each other.
While there is a growing number of MPC implementations, most of them are restricted in terms of protocols, security models, and applications. MP-SPDZ, on the other hand, offers more than 40 protocol variants in a range of security models and a programming interface that is protocol-independent. I will talk about the core design choices of MP-SPDZ and how they facilitate this versatility. Part of this is a recent result showing that it outperforms all considered frameworks that use secret sharing when focusing on scaling.
In the last part, I will present recent additions such as function-dependent preprocessing and secure shuffling. The former refers to a line of work that gains a more efficient online phase at the cost of a more involved protocol overall. We show that this approach does not perform well when evaluated holistically. Lastly, secure shuffling is a primitive that is instrumental in relevant applications such as database operations and decision tree training.