Imagine a scenario involving a vendor that offers two distinct digital products for sale at the same price (such as mobile apps or digital content) and a customer that would like to purchase exactly one of these two products. Furthermore, suppose that the customer and vendor are interested in performing…

This article is a step-by-step guide to assembling and publishing a small, open-source Python package. While not all of the steps below will be appropriate or desirable for every package, each of these can contribute to the accessibility and maintainability of the package. Note that this material is meant to…

There are a variety of obstacles that can make it a challenge to deliver the benefits of privacy-preserving secure computation capabilities to organizations. These can include a lengthy process for obtaining approval to install new software, the cost and personnel effort associated with provisioning new cloud resources, and the technical…

Suppose you are implementing a service that works with data sets that represent routes on a map (e.g., collections of driving directions or logs of past trips). The road network is represented as a graph with nodes and edges, and each route is conceptually a collection of edges. …

If you are working on a project in which you must enumerate, traverse, and/or test every possible combination of elements from one or more finite (or even infinite) collections, Python provides a variety of ways to do so. This article reviews some of the syntactically concise ways to do so…

Privacy-enhancing and secure computation technologies are ready today to transform your workflows and services. — By building and deploying web services or data analysis workflows that employ emerging privacy-enhancing and secure computation technologies such as secure multi-party computation (MPC), organizations can provide new services, identify and leverage new business opportunities, reduce risks and costs for both themselves and their customers, and comply with evolving regulations…

Suppose your Python library needs to load some sensitive binary data from a file into a contiguous block of memory (e.g., in order to use it for some application-specific operation). Furthermore, you have some additional requirements that must be met for security and auditing purposes: you need to ensure that…

The ability to synthesize logical circuits as data structures (without any intention of implementing such circuits as hardware) is becoming increasingly relevant as technologies such as garbled circuit protocols and quantum computing platforms begin to mature. …

Suppose you are maintaining a domain-specific machine learning library. Users of the library’s API expect that every machine learning algorithm offered by the API will have the same interface (i.e., the same methods with the same signatures) regardless of its underlying implementation. …