Cours de Enigma

Enigma is a decentralized computation platform with guaranteed privacy. Our goal is to enable developers to build 'privacy by design', end-to-end decentralized applications, without a trusted third party. Enigma is private. Using secure multi-party computation (sMPC or MPC), data queries are computed in a distributed way, without a trusted third party. Data is split between different nodes, and they compute functions together without leaking information to other nodes. Specifically, no single party ever has access to data in its entirety; instead, every party has a meaningless (i.e., seemingly random) piece of it. Enigma is scalable. Unlike blockchains, computations and data storage are not replicated by every node in the network. Only a small subset perform each computation over different parts of the data. The decreased redundancy in storage and computations enables more demanding computations. The key new utility Enigma brings to the table is the ability to run computations on data, without having access to the raw data itself. For example, a group of people can provide access to their salary, and together compute the average wage of the group. Each participant learns their relative position in the group, but learns nothing about other members' salaries. It should be made clear that this is only a motivating example. In practice, any program can be securely evaluated while maintaining the inputs a secret.