28 April 2026 - John Liagouris

In this talk, I will give an overview of the BU secure analytics stack, a new system we developed at Boston University to enable complex analytics on large private datasets using cryptographically secure multiparty computation (MPC). The BU stack allows multiple data holders to contribute data towards a joint analysis in the cloud while keeping the data siloed, even from the cloud providers. At the same time, it enables cloud providers to offer their services to clients who would have otherwise refused to perform a computation altogether or insisted that it be done on private infrastructure. Our work takes a systems approach to MPC: by carefully co-designing all layers of the software stack, we unlock optimizations that would not be possible with off-the-shelf libraries, allowing us to reach a scale and workload complexity that had previously been achieved only with information leakage or the use of trusted compute. I will conclude the talk with a broader vision for a unified analytics platform that integrates cryptographic techniques and hardware enclaves to support use cases with different performance and security requirements.