09-15, 12:00–12:25 (Europe/Berlin), Atelier - Side Stage
Metadata privacy is critical for personal and private data access. Today, mixnet-like systems are still the only privacy option for low latency data transfer that have been proven at scale. Other techniques are not far behind though, and can allow us to get similar or stronger privacy guarantees without sacrificing latency. I've advised a funding program over the last year aimed at supporting the transition to practice of private retrieval. This talk will survey currently available systems, and our current guesses for what methods can scale to widespread adoption.
Last year, Protocol Labs launched a funding program for metadata-private data transfer. This program is rooted in the belief that a combination of cryptographic and systems techniques should be able to offer low latency private data transfer at scale.
We have worked with groups investigating paths by which PIR, Private set intersection, Multiparty Computation, trusted hardware, and homomorphic encryption can be applied to this problem. This talk will describe the state of the art, overhead costs, and promise of these various techniques.
We'll also look at ways in which the the problem can be relaxed. Traditionally, data transfer has focused on a web2 model of a single authoritative origin. Using content addressed data means both that integrity becomes much less of a problem, and allows data to be fetched from multiple remote locations. Incentivization is a useful primitive to unlink writers from readers by supporting a network intermediation layer. Nym has been a great example of the practicality of this mechanism, but it can be applied beyond mixnets as well.
<tags>IPFS</tags>
My work centers on how to make a more resilient web. To that end, I've worked on projects ranging from internet-wide measurement to privacy-protecting messaging systems. My current work at Protocol Labs is building a robust decentralized storage primitive.
I've been a ski instructor, speak some chinese, and enjoy playing with fire. I taught computer science in pyongyang.