Internet users should be able to access their data from anywhere without having to trust the web applications and cloud services storing that data.
But there's a problem. Zero-knowledge storage systems are often impractical for web apps because they can't perform often-essential functionality on behalf of the user, such as search, since they don't have the password to decrypt that data in order to search it, and you can't search encrypted data. Or can you?
This presentation introduces CrypTag, a library that enables Go programmers to easily build applications that store encrypted user data that users can tag and securely, efficiently, remotely search by those tags without revealing anything about the nature of said data to the party storing it. That is, CrypTag is a library for easily creating encrypted, taggable, searchable zero-knowledge systems.
This talk covers the tricks behind how CrypTag works, the pros and cons of using CrypTag versus alternatives, includes a live demo of a useful open source CrypTag-based program, and is suitable for anyone who knows what a server is and is excited about leveraging encryption to help everyday users and geeks alike.
Steven Phillips is a Philosopher and computer programmer. He studied Philosophy and mathematics at UC Santa Barbara before co-founding the cleverly-named Santa Barbara Hackerspace in 2010. In 2012, after heeding the warnings of Jacob Appelbaum and Julian Assange of an ever-growing surveillance state, he co-founded The Cloak Project ("TCP" for short) with AJ Bahnken. TCP has since produced the secure chat programs LanChat and Cloakcast, as well as cryptographic utility libraries written in the Go programming language. Steven is passionate about human Greatness, social justice, democratizing forces, and revolutionary projects.