Dublin, Ireland, March 31, 2023 – Trūata, a leading provider of privacy-enhanced data solutions, has been awarded first place and a prize of GBP£40,000 in the PETs Prize Red Team Challenge: Advancing Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning. The challenge was organized jointly by the UK’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and Innovate UK and the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US, with the winners announced at the Summit for Democracy 2023 event, convened by President Joe Biden.
The challenge was designed to encourage the use of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to address global societal challenges, specifically related to detecting financial crime and bolstering responses to a pandemic. The focus was to find solutions that could enable the training of Machine Learning models on distributed datasets without the need to co-locate or merge the required datasets held by multiple parties.
Trūata entered the ‘red team’ component, which allowed teams to attack the submissions of challenge participants and verify the strengths of the privacy claims being made. Trūata entered in the UK section of the competition and reviewed four submissions. The outputs and codebases of all submissions were analyzed and real-world attack scenarios were then simulated to gain a deeper understanding of potential vulnerabilities.
The team used Trūata Calibrate, a privacy risk assessment software product to quantify sources of risk in the original datasets. They were successful in highlighting several areas of potential weakness and opportunities for improvement within the submissions.
Commenting on the award win Felix Marx, CEO at Trūata said: “We want to empower companies to have the confidence to implement forward-thinking data strategies that utilize data in a responsible and ethical way. This award win is testament to the commitment to privacy and data protection from our Data Science team. It also showcases the potential of privacy-enhancing technologies to bring clarity to an organization’s customer data through automated risk assessment.”
Aoife Sexton, Chief Privacy Officer & Chief of Product Innovation at Trūata added: “Ensuring data privacy is a complicated matter, as it involves safeguarding not only explicit personal information like names and addresses, but also behavioral data such as an individual’s buying patterns or their location information. At Trūata, our products include risk and attack evaluation features to take the guesswork out of this type of privacy risk analysis. Our Calibrate software scans data for any potential re-identification risks and then performs targeted transformation to produce datasets that can be used and shared with confidence, streamlining privacy risk management and fast-tracking data innovation.”
View the PETs Prize Challenge winners announcement made at the Summit for Democracy 2023:
Click the link for the official press release from the UK government announcing the winners of the Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Prize Challenge.
Request a demo to see how Trūata Calibrate seamlessly integrates within your existing cloud environment, to secure your data pipelines and future-proof your data strategy.