Safeguarding Sensitive Data Access At Scale with Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

Microservice architecture has become a popular system design option in recent years due to its agility and scalability. Business logics are decoupled into multiple services and data can easily flow among them. However, this brings in another critical challenge in data protection - how to safeguard sensitive data while maintaining the benefits of microservices. In this talk, we will present our innovative solution to protect sensitive data lifecycle in large-scale microservice architecture. By utilizing privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) like encryption, pseudonymization and confidential computing technologies, our solution guarantees that sensitive data can only be accessible by minimal logics in trusted execution environments. In addition, to provide better transparency on sensitive data usage, computations can be audited and verified by external parties through the remote attestation mechanism. Finally, we will also discuss challenges and opportunities of applying PETs at scale.