Challenges of distributed systems: ensuring data traceability and ownership

About

Condensation Data System, CDS for short, is an open-source technology providing a complete data system for collaborating with distributed data while ensuring its security. Its implementation provides automatic conflict resolution, data integrity, and end-to-end security by design. The project led to a Swiss-based startup supported by EPFL and the TrustValley accelerator. The technology was implemented by EPFL teacher Thomas Lochmatter and promoted by Alex Mouradian, one of his former engineering students. Today, Condensation's team would like to share with the CERN its knowledge concerning secured and distributed data systems.

Agenda

Why data distribution: We will give a brief introduction on the genesis of the project and explain how we came up with the Condensation solution.

Working with immutable data: We will explain the fundamental concepts of Condensation technology. We will focus on:

How immutable data structures facilitate data distribution

The synchronisation we developed to work with such structures

The encryption layer that secures the data from end to end

Applied use-cases: we will describe concrete situations and systems where Condensation can be used.

Open-sourcing road map: We will explain the next steps in the journey of our open-source project.

Q&A

About the speakers

Thomas Lochmatter Author of Condensation Communication systems engineer from the EPFL, he holds a PhD in robotics. He has more than 20 years of experience in the industry in developing applications, connected objects, and data analysis. Over the past 10 years, he has also been teaching programming, scientific computing, and system security at EPFL. He is the author of Condensation and manages the core technology.