Data Structures for Data Privacy: Lessons Learned in Production

Friday, June 24, 2022 - 2:15 pm2:40 pm

Dr. Rebecca Bilbro and Dr. Benjamin Bengfort, Rotational Labs

Abstract: 

In this talk we present a decentralized messaging protocol and storage system in use across North America, Europe, and South East Asia. Built at the behest of an international nonprofit working group, the protocol and system are designed to address a unique problem at the intersection of financial crime regulation, distributed ledger technology, and user privacy. In our talk we discuss the many lessons learned in the process of architecting, implementing, and fostering adoption of this system. We present the Secure Envelope, a data structure that employs a combination of methods (symmetric and asymmetric encryption, mTLS, protocol buffers, etc) to safeguard data privacy both at rest and in flight.

Rebecca Bilbro, Rotational Labs

Dr. Rebecca Bilbro is a teacher, speaker, and author who earned her doctorate in 2011 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where her research centered on communication and visualization in Engineering. A veteran of startups from public sector to media & entertainment to enterprise security, Rebecca specializes in machine learning optimization and API development in distributed data systems. As CTO of Rotational Labs, she hopes to take distributed systems from theory into practice, making them more accessible, understandable and tunable for everyday developers.

Benjamin Bengfort, Rotational Labs

Dr. Benjamin Bengfort is an experienced systems engineer, programmer and data scientist who earned his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2018. Driven by a desire to build large systems with many users that have a global impact, Benjamin takes pride in solutions where many small interactions combine to create complex dynamics. As the CEO of Rotational Labs, his goal is to apply advanced distributed computing, networking, open source software, education, and machine learning to solutions that allow us to collaborate more effectively around the world to solve big problems.

BibTeX
@conference {280278,
author = {Rebecca Bilbro and Benjamin Bengfort},
title = {Data Structures for Data Privacy: Lessons Learned in Production},
year = {2022},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jun
}

Presentation Video