Tool Overview:
baffle

Here is an objective description of Baffle based on the provided content:

About Baffle

Baffle is a data protection platform that provides encryption, tokenization, and data masking capabilities for organizations storing sensitive data in cloud environments. The platform aims to protect data through a 'no-code' approach that allows companies to implement encryption without modifying their existing applications or infrastructure. Founded by Ameesh Divatia, Baffle focuses on securing data in databases, data warehouses, and analytics platforms.

What does Baffle do?

The platform offers multiple approaches to data protection, including field-level encryption, record-level encryption, tokenization, and format-preserving encryption. At its core, Baffle functions through three main components: Baffle Manager for administration and key management, Baffle Shield for SQL/NoSQL data proxying, and Baffle Secure Multiparty Compute for enabling operations on encrypted data. The platform integrates with hardware security modules (HSMs), cloud key managers, and secrets managers to handle customer-owned encryption keys.

The technology enables organizations to perform analytics and queries on encrypted data without decrypting the underlying values. This is achieved through a security architecture where encrypted values remain separate from encryption keys, using a message-passing protocol between the database and a separate compute domain. All encryption methods utilize the AES encryption algorithm, with support for NIST-certified and FIPS-validated modes.

What makes Baffle different?

A key technical differentiator is Baffle's approach to protecting multi-tenant environments through record-level encryption. This allows different encryption keys to be mapped to different data owners within the same database column, enabling data segmentation in shared environments. The platform supports data shredding by deleting public and private keys for specific entities when needed.

The platform places particular emphasis on maintaining application functionality while data is encrypted. Users can perform operations like sorting, searching, and mathematical calculations on encrypted data through Baffle's implementation of Secure Multiparty Compute (SMPC). This allows organizations to work with sensitive data while maintaining compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.

Use cases and industries

Baffle serves organizations across multiple sectors, with particular adoption in financial services and healthcare. Common use cases include securing cloud migrations, protecting multi-tenant SaaS environments, and enabling secure analytics on sensitive data. The platform is particularly relevant for organizations moving data to cloud platforms like Snowflake, AWS Redshift, and MongoDB, where it can protect data during migration and in the target environment.

Financial institutions use the platform to maintain customer data privacy while performing analytics, often implementing Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) capabilities to give customers control over their data encryption. Healthcare organizations utilize Baffle to protect patient health information (PHI) while enabling secure data sharing between providers and payers. The platform also serves organizations needing to comply with PCI DSS requirements for payment card data protection.