The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly — Lessons from an MPC for Social Good Deployment
Contributor(s)
Gabe Kaptchuk, Jen Benoit-Bryan, Kinan Dak Albab, Mia Locks, and Mayank Varia
Session
Cryptography and Privacy for the People
Abstract
In Fall 2021, the president of Museums Moving Forward (MMF) approached us, cryptographers at Boston University, about using MPC to support one of their new projects. MMF is an independent organization of art museum professionals devoted to envisioning and creating a more just museum sector by 2030. Their new project was a survey about working conditions in museums that would be distributed to thousands of museum workers throughout the United States and ask about highly sensitive topics. In this talk, we will share the story of this deployment of MPC, with a focus on the socio-technical lessons we learned. Working collaboratively across disciplinary boundaries required developing shared language, bridging epistemological gaps, and designing new MPC features on the fly to recover from mistakes. While we ultimately take pride in overcoming these challenges, the process was difficult and we found that most of the barriers to MPC deployment are not technical, but social.