Stealth developed the PULSAR (Private Updateable Lightweight Scalable Active Repository) system under the DARPA Brandeis program (Phases I–III, spanning 5+ years from 2015–2020), named after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who was known for defending people’s right to privacy:
“The Brandeis program seeks to develop the technical means to protect the private and proprietary information of individuals and enterprises. The vision of the Brandeis program is to break the tension between: (a) maintaining privacy and (b) being able to tap into the huge value of data. Rather than having to balance between them, Brandeis aims to build a third option – enabling safe and predictable sharing of data in which privacy is preserved.” (Source: DARPA)
The Brandeis program targeted three application areas or “verticals”: Enterprise, Internet of Things (IoT), and Mobile, with each area divided into four technical areas. As the only team chosen for all three verticals, we performed in the first technical area – providing software backends to support the requisite standards for security, privacy, and utility – across these three application areas.
The Brandeis program spanned more than five years and included several “seedling” projects, which extended technologies we built for the program and applied them to specific use cases. These side projects covered a wide range of technologies across the three program verticals (Mobile, IoT, Enterprise), including:
- Collection, Storage, and Utilization of Private Data via Searchable Encryption
- Locating Nearby “Safe Spots” via MPC
- Optimizing Resource Allocation via MPC
- Automatic Anomaly Detection via FSS
- Finding Central Meeting Locations via MPC
- Finding Mutually Available Meeting Times via MPC
- Contact Tracing via FSS
- Generating Statistics on Private, Siloed Data via MPC
- Naval Ship Management/Logistics via FSS and MPC
This work was supported by DARPA and NIWC Pacific under Contract No. N66001-15-C-4065, Distribution Statement A: “Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited. If you have any questions, please contact the Public Release Center”. The views, opinions and/or findings expressed are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
