Protecting Your Data In Use At Enveil with Ellison Anne Williams - Episode 45

There are myriad reasons why data should be protected, and just as many ways to enforce it in tranist or at rest. Unfortunately, there is still a weak point where attackers can gain access to your unencrypted information. In this episode Ellison Anny Williams, CEO of Enveil, describes how her company uses homomorphic encryption to ensure that your analytical queries can be executed without ever having to decrypt your data.

Preamble

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, read the show notes, and get in touch.
Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at dataengineeringpodcast.com/chat
Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Ellison Anne Williams about Enveil, a pioneering data security company protecting Data in Use

Interview

Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data security?
Can you start by explaining what your mission is with Enveil and how the company got started?
One of the core aspects of your platform is the principal of homomorphic encryption. Can you explain what that is and how you are using it?
- What are some of the challenges associated with scaling homomorphic encryption?
- What are some difficulties associated with working on encrypted data sets?

Can you describe the underlying architecture for your data platform?
- How has that architecture evolved from when you first began building it?

What are some use cases that are unlocked by having a fully encrypted data platform?

For someone using the Enveil platform, what does their workflow look like?

A major reason for never decrypting data is to protect it from attackers and unauthorized access. What are some of the remaining attack vectors?

What are some aspects of the data being protected that still require additional consideration to prevent leaking information? (e.g. identifying individuals based on geographic data, or purchase patterns)

What do you have planned for the future of Enveil?

Contact Info

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data security today?

Links

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Support Data Engineering Podcast