In a perfect world, every piece of data could only be accessed by specific people to whom the owner gave permission. And the owner would retain the ability to change their mind and take it back – even if the data isn’t in their possession.

This is exactly what’s possible with our Data Control Platform and it’s powered by transform encryption.

Transform encryption, which is a variation on proxy re-encryption (PRE), allows the delegation of decryption rights from one party to another where each party has their own secret keys. In order to decrypt, a server needs to assist, but that server never sees anything confidential and has no power to decide who can or can’t decrypt data.

This opens up all sorts of possibilities for zero-trust data systems, end-to-end encryption, and true data ownership backed by math. Our implementation brings other benefits, too:

• Policy-driven: for labeled data, a developer doesn’t even need to know to whom it should be encrypted.
• Separation-of-roles: for corporate data, the security and privacy teams get to decide who can see which types and sensitivities of data.
• Developer-proof: we’ve made it nearly impossible for a developer to make a choice that would reduce the security of the system. This makes it easy for developers without cryptography experience to implement.
• Audit trails: all accesses to data are logged along with updates so every piece of information can be tracked and you can know who saw it and when.
• Storage indifferent: it doesn’t matter where the data is stored, who controls the storage, or even if the data is being held in an immutable ledger or an offline backup drive. The owner can still change who can decrypt it.
• Data-hungry: works just as well for field-level, row-level, partition-level data and for encryption of large and small files.
• Rotation-ready: we allow keys to be pre-generated for employees. Then, once they log in for the first time, it rotates their keys automatically. Key rotations at every level can be triggered at will.
• Groups and users: encrypt to groups and the group owner decides who the members are. Or encrypt directly to individual users.
• Granular revocation: access can be revoked by removing group members, but users are themselves groups of devices and they can revoke access to any device if it is lost, stolen, or sold.

Want to learn more? Watch our fireside chat for a breakdown of transform encryption use cases.