Blind Poker in a Pandemic

Why Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) is critical to saving privacy, the economy, and the world

As COVID-19 wracks the world, most countries have enacted some form of non-essential business shutdown and/or social distancing protocols to stop the spread of this lethal virus. These measures have had a dramatic impact on the global economy, ensuring that countries like the United States have seen sharp declines in their GDP at levels unseen since the Great Depression.

Shutdown and social distancing are largely efforts to deal with COVID’s high rate of transmission (currently understood to be over twice that of the 1918 H1N1 pandemic in some strains/locations) and a lack of readily available testing at scale. Without a way to effectively test and track sick people, it is impossible to check the spread of COVID without social distancing and economic shutdowns. As such, many governments have begun sweeping efforts to create testing and tracking programs for people infected or exposed to COVID-infected individuals that work at a national scale.

Contact tracing: privacy vs. protection?

The difficulties of testing people are something best left for another post. This post focuses specifically on contact tracing, the practice of tracking…