Data Council Blog

Data Council Blog

NuCypher - Featured Startup SF '18

In this blog series leading up to our SF18 conference, we invite our featured startups to tell us more about their data engineering challenges. Today, we speak with NuCypher, an early-stage company building a decentralized encryption service.

 
Q:  What surprised you most as an engineer about the work you did that you'll be telling us about in your talk? 
 

MacLane WilkisonI first discovered proxy re-encryption while working on ZeroDB, an end-to-end encrypted database. We used it as a way to allow other people to query your encrypted data. It's a really bizarre technology that intuitively seems like it shouldn't be possible: taking data encrypted under one key and "transforming" or re-encrypting it such that it's encrypted under another key. 


Q: What do you think a listener will get out of this this talk vs. other talks on distributed data processing and data versioning that they've previously heard?

MacLane Wilkison: A better understanding of data security challenges in distributed systems, particularly in decentralized, public consensus networks.
 
 

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About the Startups Track

The data-oriented Startups Track at DataEngConf features dozen of startups forging ahead with innovative approaches to data and new data technologies. We find the most interesting startups at the intersection of ML, AI, data infrastructure and new applications of data science and highlight them in technical talks by their CTOs and lead engineers who are building these platforms. 

Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Strategy

Robert Winslow

Written by Robert Winslow

Robert is a seasoned software consultant with a decade of experience shipping great products. He thrives in early-stage startup environments, and works primarily in Go, Python, and Rust. He has led backend development at companies like RankScience and Spot.com; created a rigorous, open-source time-series benchmarking suite for InfluxData; and rapidly prototyped software in a skunkworks-type product lab. He’s taught graduate statistics at GalvanizeU and mentored at the Stanford d.school. He helps maintain Google’s FlatBuffers project, one of the world’s fastest serialization libraries. A colleague once described him as “the developer equivalent of ‘The Wolf’ from Pulp Fiction."