It was such a beautiful day here today for a stroll across the Stanford campus to hear Peter Wayner give a lunch time talk at Stanford Law School on one of his favorite topics, Translucent Databases.
I’d not met Peter before — so it was fun to both meet him and hear his explanation (mostly to a group of law students and professors) about how databases might be better protected if personal information was first transformed (by one-way functions) into data that would just be junk to either inside or outside attackers.
Simson Garfinkel wrote a good article on the subject a while back that’s well worth reading for an introduction to the subject. By the way, Simson has recently made a draft of his MIT PhD thesis titled Creating Systems that are Simultaneously Usable and Secure available online.