Twine

Inspiration

I work in cyber security providing services to Healthcare. I am too familiar with the impacts of data breaches.

**44% of Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Organizations Have Experienced a Data Breach Caused By a Third Party in the Last 12 Months [Securelink report]

My employer uses AI technology in the protection of health records. To train and operate models we need access to private health data. This is a headache for us as we have to negotiate access and provide evidence to our data providers that we are keeping their data secure.

The thing is we don't want your data. We only want to use your data.

What it does

We built Twine on confidential computing infrastructure to provide privacy-preserving computation. This allows a person to use the data without ever having the data.

Twine allows data providers and application providers to use secure enclaves. In Twine, compute is run under an isolated hypervisor that is secured by hardware with hardware-based attestation.

How we built it

In security, we like proven technology from trusted parties.

In building Twine we used AWS Nitro Secure Enclaves, and middle-ware from the Veracruz Project -- Funded by the Confidential Computing Consortium.

The underlying hardware technology has existed for several years. Various groups are working on middleware to make this technology more accessible, but they are very early and portions are still in the late research phase.

Twine provides a fully integrated system as a service with a more friendly interface to provide the next layer of accessibility.

Challenges we ran into

Daniel: Setting up the basic AWS infrastructure was particularly challenging to me as I've always had someone else to deal with that in my professional career.

Siri: A challenge I ran into is how to format the front interface such as the colors, size, or layout.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Daniel: This a real solution to a real problem.

Siri: I'm proud that I could code by myself for the first time!

What we learned

Daniel: I had heard of secure enclave computing but this is the first time I've used it!

Siri: I learned how to work with HTML, javascript, and CSS to build an interface, and how to make a pitch presentation and improve my video-editing skills.

What's next for Twine

Daniel: I plan on developing this project and presenting it at our company hackathon in April with an eye for using it for our internal data handling and also providing these capabilities as a service to our customers!

Siri: I want to continue to improve this application to make it more efficient!

Built With

• aws.
• docker
• html
• javascript
• veracruz
• wasm