New NSF Award with Mayank Varia and John Liagouris

Excited to announce a new 3-year $1.2M NSF Award (PI: Mayank Varia, Co-PIs: Vasiliki Kalavri and John Liagouris) for building a Privacy-Preserving Cloud Analytics Testbed. The award builds upon the Boston University secure data analytics stack and is the result of the team’s efforts to build and deploy applications in the wild that use privacy-enhancing technologies and provide practical performance with strong security guarantees.

The project focuses on developing an open-source software platform to enable the deployment of privacy-preserving scientific workflows across both open and commercial cloud infrastructures. To achieve this, the team is building the Open Privacy-preserving Analytics Lab (OPAL)—a platform designed to provide comprehensive data protection at rest, in transit, and, most crucially, during use. By leveraging advanced privacy-enhancing technologies like cryptographically secure multiparty computation and trusted execution environments (TEEs), OPAL will serve as both a testbed for organizations to evaluate these tools and an automated orchestration engine for real-world, multi-cloud deployments.