IPEN events bring together privacy experts and engineers from public authorities, industry, academia and civil society to discuss relevant challenges and developments for the engineering and technological implementation of data protection and privacy requirements into all phases of the development process.
The EDPS and the Goethe University Frankfurt would like to invite you to the Internet Privacy Engineering Network (IPEN) event on "Secure multi-party computation" that will take place in the Goethe-University Frankfurt on 21 October 2025.
How to attend:
Physical attendance:
Address: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Campus Westend, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 1, 60323 Frankfurt (Germany)
Venue: Room 1.801 in the "Casino" building – this is building #7 in this map
Online participation: The link to the online participation will be published one week before the event
No registration is required
Agenda
| 14:00 - 14:20 | Welcome introduction |
Wojciech Wiewiórowski, EDPS Goethe University |
| 14:20 - 14:40 |
Keynote speech: “Secure Multi-Party Computation - Setting the scene” Key Topics:
|
Ivan Damgård Aarhus University (DK) |
| 14:40 - 15:40 |
Panel 1: “Implementations and real-world use cases” Key Topics:
|
Thomas Schneider Vincent Dunning Riivo Talviste Hossein Yalame Moderator: Giuseppe D'Acquisto |
| 15:40 - 16:00 | Coffee break | |
| 16:05 - 17:05 |
Panel 2: “Challenges, risk models, and the road ahead” Key Topics:
|
Thomas Lorünser Idoia Gamiz Christian Rechberger Christian Brendel Liina Kamm |
| 17:05 - 17:20 | Final remarks |
Secure multi-party computation
In a data-driven world where collaboration among diverse parties is increasingly important, yet privacy remains paramount, secure multi-party computation (SMPC) is set to play a vital role as a privacy-enhancing technology (PET). By enabling multiple parties to jointly compute on private data without revealing it to one another, SMPC represents a transformative approach to secure data processing, particularly in sensitive domains such as finance, healthcare, national security, and AI development.
This conference brings together experts from academia, industry, and technology to examine SMPC’s growing role in solving some of the most pressing challenges in data privacy, digital sovereignty, and cross-border data collaboration.
Throughout the event, we will explore fundamental and practical questions, including:
- What is SMPC, and how does it compare to other privacy-preserving methods?
- What are the main protocols and computational models, and where do their limitations lie?
- Which real-world use cases are leading adoption - ranging from fraud detection to federated learning?
- How are European research initiatives and regulatory frameworks advancing the maturity of SMPC technologies?
- What are the practical obstacles to integrating SMPC into existing data workflows, and how can we overcome them?
- How do we balance privacy, performance, and cost, especially when applied to large-scale or latency-sensitive computations?
- What are the legal implications of SMPC under the GDPR, particularly in the context of cross-border data transfers and compliance?
- Are emerging standards and best practices sufficient to guide secure and interoperable implementations of SMPC?
- Finally, how might SMPC intersect with the development and deployment of artificial intelligence - either as a complementary safeguard or a technical challenge?
As we stand at the intersection of legal, technical, and ethical imperatives, SMPC offers a compelling framework for trust-by-design collaboration. This event will not only assess its current capabilities and limitations but also chart a path forward - toward scalable, legally sound, and performance-aware applications of this promising technology.
Join us - on-site or virtually - as we delve into the benefits and risks that Secure multi-party computation brings to the future of privacy.
Speakers
Ivan Damgård
Ivan Damgård is a professor in Computer Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests include cryptography, secure computation, information theory and related mathematics and algorithms. He is the author of 130+ peer reviewed publications. He is a fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, and he has received the 2023 Dijkstra Price in distributed computing as well as test of time awards from the STOC, TCC and PKC conferences. He is cofounder of spin-off companies Cryptomathic, Sepior and Partisia, focusing on applications of secure computing.
Thomas Schneider
Thomas Schneider is full professor for Cryptography and Privacy Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. Before, he was an independent research group leader at the same institution (2012-2018), did a PhD in IT Security at Ruhr-University Bochum (2008-2011), and wrote his Master's thesis during a research internship at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, NJ, USA (2007).
His research focuses on privacy-enhancing technologies, cryptographic protocols, applied cryptography, and computer security. He heads the Cryptography and Privacy Engineering Group (ENCRYPTO), whose mission is to demonstrate that privacy can be efficiently protected in real-world applications. For this, his group combines applied cryptography and algorithm engineering to develop cryptographic protocols and tools for protecting sensitive data and algorithms.
For his research in the areas of multi-party computation, private set intersection, and private function evaluation, he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant 2019 and an ERC Consolidator Grant 2023.
Riivo Talviste
Riivo Talviste is a senior security engineer at Cybernetica AS, where he has been working for 14 years on the practical aspects of MPC. He has been at the forefront of several MPC deployments that work on real data. Riivo received his PhD from the University of Tartu, with his research centred on the practical lessons learned from applying MPC in real-world scenarios.
At Cybernetica, Riivo leads the development of Sharemind MPC, one of the earliest secure multi-party computation platforms. In recent years, the development focus has been on long-term maintainability and embracing cloud-native technologies.
Hossein Yalame, Bosch Research Germany
Hossein Yalame is a Research Engineer at Bosch Research in Renningen, Germany. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from TU Darmstadt and works at the forefront of privacy-enhancing cryptography, focusing on Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP).
Hossein drives the development of efficient, scalable protocols for privacy-preserving data analytics, federated learning, and trustworthy AI. By bridging rigorous cryptographic theory with real-world deployments, his research is shaping how sensitive data can be securely processed across industries. His work appears in top-tier venues such as IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, PETS, and ASIACRYPT, reflecting both scientific depth and practical relevance.
He is the winner of the GDD Science Award for Young Academics 2024, a finalist for the 2025 CAST/GI Dissertation Award in IT Security, and a Distinguished Reviewer at the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML). Hossein serves on the program committees of leading security and privacy conferences—including USENIX Security, NDSS, ACM CCS, and PETS—helping to steer the future of cryptography and privacy research.
Idoia Gamiz
Idoia Gamiz is a cybersecurity researcher at Tecnalia, where she is part of the Core Cybersecurity & DLTs research team in the DIGITAL unit. She collaborates on both national and international research projects. Idoia holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of the Basque Country (EHU), with a specialization in Applied Mathematics, and a Master’s degree in Mathematical Modelling, Research, Statistics, and Computing from the same university. She is currently completing her PhD in the Doctoral Programme in Mobile Network Information and Communication Technologies at EHU. She also lectures in the Master’s program on Cybersecurity in Industry 4.0 at the EHU, where she teaches the course “Algorithms and Advanced Cryptographic Techniques”.
Her main research areas include cybersecurity, advanced cryptography, secure data exploitation, and federated learning. In particular, she has been working with Secure Multi-Party Computation technology since she started her Master’s studies, and she has authored, among others, the article “Challenges and future research directions in secure multi-party computation for resource-constrained devices and large-scale computations”.
Christian Brendel
Dr. Christian Brendel is a physicist and engineer by training, with degrees in Physics and Mechanical Engineering from Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, where his research explored the frontiers of quantum optics and computational modelling.
Following his academic work, Dr. Brendel joined the founding team of Tools for Humanity, where he played a key role in launching the World Project. As Head of AI and Biometrics at Tools for Humanity, he leads efforts to develop cutting-edge, privacy-preserving biometric recognition systems, leveraging both iris and facial signals to advance secure and ethical identity technology. Through this work Dr. Brendel has played a critical role in the development and deployment of the Anonymized Multi-Party Computation system that World Project has pioneered.
Vincent Dunning
Vincent Dunning has a background in cybersecurity from the University of Twente. Since four years, he is a researcher in the Applied Cryptography & Quantum Algorithms department at the Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO).
There, he specializes in privacy-enhancing technologies such as multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs. A large portion of his work at TNO has been focused on practical MPC protocols for jointly combatting money-laundering across financial institutions in the Netherlands.
Liina Kamm
Liina Kamm is a senior researcher and principal investigator at Cybernetica (a deep-tech SME in Estonia). She researches privacy enhancing technologies and their uptake, and the privacy and security of AI systems. She holds a PhD degree in computer science (cryptography) from the University of Tartu. She is Cybernetica’s principal investigator for the Horizon Europe project CHESS (Cyber-security Excellence Hub in Estonia and South Moravia) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) project PAI-MACHINE on machine-optimising machine learning algorithms for secure multi-party computation. She leads the AI security and privacy research team in the Estonian Centre of Excellence in AI (EXAI). She is the chairman of Technical Committee 4 (Information technology) of the Estonian Centre for Standardisation and Accreditation.
Giuseppe D’Acquisto
Giuseppe D’Acquisto is senior technology policy advisor for the Italian Data Protection Authority. He is the national delegate within the Technology Expert Group of the EDPB and the International Working Group on Data Protection in Technology. He has been appointed ENISA expert for Data Protection Engineering and EDPB representative on Artificial Intelligence within the High-Level Group of the European Commission for the Digital Markets Act. He is professor in Artificial intelligence at the University LUISS in Rome. He holds a degree in electronic engineering and a PhD in computer science.
See our data protection notice for further information.