BA/MA: Developing a Modern Garbled Circuit Framework in Secure Code Environment

Description

We are looking for a motivated Bachelor or Master student to work on a thesis focused on Garbled Circuits, a key technique in secure multi-party computation (MPC). The goal is to (re)-implement core ideas from modern research and build a new Rust-based garbled circuit engine from scratch that overcomes the limitations of current frameworks—many of which are outdated, rigid, and poorly documented.

What are Garbled Circuits?
Originally proposed by Andrew Yao, garbled circuits allow two parties to compute a function jointly without revealing their inputs. They are a cornerstone of privacy-preserving cryptography and have wide-ranging applications in secure multiparty computation.

There are many theoretical advancements in Garbled Circuits (in particular dynamic linking) and we ourselves have many ideas how to improve the state of the art in this field but the current SOTA framework (EMP) is rigid and poorly documened. The goal of this work is therefore to re-implementing existing techniques and subsequently also extend this by not yet implemented work.

Your task:
- Reimplement selected protocols and optimizations from research papers

- Design a clean and extensible architecture in Rust

- Explore and implement novel features based on our theoretical groundwork

Who we’re looking for:
This project will require close cooperation with people at the chair, so you should like to come in and discuss and brainstorm about cryptography and protocols.

Your Profile:
You should have a strong interest in cryptography or privacy technologies, solid programming skills in Rust, and the ability to think critically about system design and edge cases.

This is a great opportunity to apply theory to practice, contribute to open-source, and potentially lay groundwork for future research.

Further Reading:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTxh908u9y8 [Brief History of Garbled Circuits]
https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1519.pdf [Not yet implemented but of great potential interest]

CONTACT:
Maximilian von Tschirschnitz

maximilian.tschirschnitz@sec.in.tum.de