An Intellyx Brain Candy Update
Baffle has come a long way since we last interviewed the company in December 2017.
Baffle’s original innovation was the ability to process encrypted data without having to decrypt them. This technique resembles homomorphic encryption, but Baffle is far faster and can execute any operation on the data while homomorphic encryption only allows certain operations.
In the intervening time, Baffle has leveraged this core IP to provide record-level masking, tokenization, and encryption for databases (including database-as-a-service offerings), data warehouses, and most recently, the data for configuring and prompting the large language models behind generative AI (genAI).
At the heart of Baffle’s offering is a cloud native client-side (reverse) proxy that handles encryption, decryption, key management, and reporting tasks at scale. The proxy works with third-party applications without the need for any code changes to those applications.
Baffle works with genAI prompts and the context documents that configure LLMs. For example, Baffle may tokenize or encrypt individual PII (personally identifiable information) fields within natural language prompts and their genAI-generated responses.
Baffle’s sweet spot is structured data, where it works with both INSERT and SELECT operations. Baffle also works with semi-structured data including JSON and the Apache Parquet columnar storage format.
Baffle helps organizations comply with privacy-related regulations, as well as privacy protection for risk reduction generally (for example, protecting against data theft as the result of ransomware attacks).
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