Secure Storage and Privacy-Preserving Scanpath Comparison via Garbled Circuits in Eye Tracking

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 21 Apr 2026] Secure Storage and Privacy-Preserving Scanpath Comparison via Garbled Circuits in Eye Tracking Suleyman Ozdel, Amr Nader, Yasmeen Abdrabou, Enkelejda Kasneci With the growing use of eye tracking on VR and mobile platforms, gaze data is increasing. While scanpath comparison is important to gaze behavior analysis, existing methods lack privacy-preserving capabilities for real-world use. We present a garbled-circuit (GC)-based approach enabling secure storage and privacy-preserving scanpath comparison under the semi-honest model. It supports two configurations: (1) a two-party setting where the data owner and processor jointly compute similarity scores without revealing their inputs, and (2) a server-assisted setting where encrypted scanpaths are stored and processed while the data owner remains offline. All decryption and comparison operations are executed inside the GC. Experiments on three eye-tracking datasets evaluate fidelity, runtime, and communication, and show secure results for MultiMatch, ScanMatch, and SubsMatch closely match plaintext outcomes, with manageable runtime and communication overhead. Tests under various network conditions indicate that the design remains feasible for real-world privacy-preserving scanpath analysis and can be extended to other GC-based behavioral algorithms. Comments: Accepted at Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI), Vol. 10, Article ETRA008, to be presented at ETRA 2026. 24 pages (including appendix) Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) Cite as: arXiv:2604.19422 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.19422v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.19422 Focus to learn more Journal reference: Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 10, ETRA, (May 2026) Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3806022 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Süleyman Özdel [view email] [v1] Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:53:20 UTC (1,238 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.HC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)