Most modern data processing pipelines run on top of a distributed storage layer, and securing the whole system, and the storage layer in particular, against accidental or malicious misuse is crucial to ensuring compliance to rules and regulations. Enforcing data protection and privacy rules, however, stands at odds with the requirement to achieve higher and higher access bandwidths and processing rates in large data processing pipelines.

In this talk, I present our recent proposal for the path forward that reconciles the two goals. We call our approach ``Software-Defined Data Protection'' (SDP). Its premise is simple, yet powerful: decoupling often changing policies from request-level enforcement allows distributed smart storage nodes to implement the latter at line-rate. Existing and future data protection frameworks can be translated to the same hardware interface which allows storage nodes to offload enforcement efficiently both for company-specific rules and regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA.

While SDP is a promising approach, there are several remaining challenges to making this vision reality. As I will explain in the talk, overcoming these will require collaboration across several domains, including security, databases and specialized hardware design.

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Zsolt István is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Zsolt works in the intersection of databases, distributed systems, and FPGA programming. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the Systems Group at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.