Modern computation is rarely performed by a single machine. Data is often stored, processed and analyzed across many computers, organizations or users. During his PhD, Jakob Burkhardt studied how such distributed computations can be carried out more efficiently, securely and privately.

The dissertation develops new protocols for three different settings. The first part studies how several parties can synchronize large datasets while communicating only information about the differences. The second part studies how cryptographic keys for RSA can be generated without relying on a single trusted party. The third part studies how data analysis tasks such as regression can be performed while reducing the risk of revealing sensitive information about individuals.

The PhD study was completed at the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Aarhus University.

This summary was prepared by the PhD student.