August 2021 Summaries

Treecard is an innovative debit card initiative, powered by Ecosia, that aims to combat climate change by planting trees each time users make a transaction with their wooden card, with a goal of planting a billion trees by 2026. The company has partnered with Evervault to ensure the secure encryption of all cardholder data, thus safeguarding user information and minimizing the scope of PCI DSS compliance requirements. By using Evervault's encryption infrastructure, Treecard can focus more on expanding its user base and environmental impact, while maintaining high security standards. This collaboration exemplifies how financial technology can facilitate environmental action, making a positive impact as accessible as a simple payment.

Evervault is dedicated to building encryption infrastructure for developers with the mission of encrypting the web to prevent data breaches, prioritizing security alongside achieving high compliance standards. Recently, Evervault achieved Level 2 PCI DSS compliance, allowing it to process up to 300,000 annual transactions for VISA, MasterCard, and Discover, and up to 2.5 million for American Express. This compliance is crucial for ensuring consumer protection against fraud and data breaches, though it often burdens companies with extensive processes. Evervault simplifies PCI compliance for developers and businesses, as evidenced by customers like Treecard, who benefit from reduced PCI DSS scope and focus more on core business activities. The company completed an SAQ-D and Attestation of Compliance with a qualified security assessor, including a penetration test by Cure53, and plans to achieve PCI DSS Level 1 certification as its transaction volume grows.

Evervault is focused on providing encryption infrastructure for developers to enhance web security and prevent data breaches, with a strong emphasis on achieving the highest compliance standards for customer assurance. The company has recently attained compliance with both HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II, underscoring its commitment to security. Under HIPAA, Evervault acts as a business associate for covered entities like hospitals and healthcare startups, allowing them to encrypt and process electronic protected health information (ePHI). Customers can maintain HIPAA compliance by entering a Business Associate Agreement with Evervault. Additionally, the SOC 2 Type II compliance reflects Evervault's strict adherence to information security protocols, offering an independent assessment of its control environment to reassure customers about data security, availability, and confidentiality. Evervault invites developers and businesses needing to secure sensitive data to begin using its encryption solutions.

Okra is a company developing open finance infrastructure in Africa, empowering digital financial applications by enabling developers to connect with users' financial accounts for data retrieval, KYC checks, and payments. Prioritizing privacy and security, Okra collaborates with Evervault to ensure encryption across Africa's financial data network, allowing them to build and transfer data securely without handling sensitive information in plaintext. This partnership facilitates the development of innovative financial technology solutions across the continent while maintaining high security standards. Evervault's encryption infrastructure plays a critical role in maintaining Okra’s 99.9% uptime guarantee, underscoring their commitment to safe and seamless user experiences.

Manna is pioneering the future of last-mile delivery by using drones to deliver goods across Europe, having achieved the first light unmanned aircraft system operator certificate for drone delivery in the region. They have partnered with Evervault to ensure that all data within their delivery network is fully encrypted and secure, preventing sensitive information from existing in plaintext on their systems. This collaboration allows Manna to focus on regulatory approvals, broadening product selection, and reducing costs and delivery times, while Evervault provides robust encryption solutions to safeguard customer privacy and data security. Both companies are committed to maintaining high standards of privacy and security, envisioning a future where delivery is efficient and environmentally friendly, and data breaches are virtually eliminated.

During its closed preview, Evervault has been used by companies such as Manna, Okra, and Vital to secure their applications and services through encryption, emphasizing security as a primary concern when developing new apps. Manna focuses on drone delivery networks, Okra on open finance infrastructure in Africa, and Vital on APIs for wearables data, all benefiting from Evervault's ability to simplify the complexities of encryption, allowing developers to concentrate on feature differentiation. The company stresses the critical nature of its encryption infrastructure, noting that any downtime impacts both their customers and end users, thus prioritizing robustness and reliability in engineering decisions. During this preview phase, developers using Evervault have encrypted millions of sensitive data fields, positioning Evervault as a key player in the future of a secured and encrypted web, encouraging other developers to adopt encryption practices for enhanced security.

Vital is revolutionizing the healthcare software development landscape by providing an API that facilitates the integration of wearable health data, such as from Fitbit and Peloton, into applications while ensuring data security through encryption. Partnering with Evervault, Vital guarantees HIPAA compliance and prioritizes the secure processing and transfer of users' health data, aiming to offer developers a seamless and efficient experience with minimal coding required. Evervault supports this initiative by developing an encryption engine that ensures low-latency and secure data transmission, fostering a security-first approach in building future healthcare applications. This collaboration envisions transforming the healthcare infrastructure akin to the impact of Twilio in telecoms and Stripe in payments, ultimately aiming for a future where sensitive health data is protected from breaches.

Evervault aims to revolutionize web security by making encryption a standard practice for all developers, ensuring that both user data and proprietary datasets are protected from breaches. The company emphasizes the importance of prioritizing security from the onset of a project, as retrofitting it later is challenging and risky. By abstracting the complexities of encryption, Evervault enables developers to easily integrate robust security measures into their applications, transforming every developer into a security engineer by default. The goal is to create a web where all data is encrypted from end to end, without compromising usability, thereby eliminating plaintext data breaches. Evervault believes that as encryption becomes more accessible and streamlined, developers will naturally gravitate towards building secure, encrypted applications, making it an inevitable standard in software development.

Evervault is focused on creating encryption infrastructure for developers with the aim of fundamentally transforming data privacy and security across the web. Their mission is to eliminate data breaches by integrating encryption seamlessly into the development process, advocating for principles such as keeping data encrypted at all times, using environments called "Cages" for secure data processing, and ensuring that sensitive data is never stored or transmitted without encryption. They emphasize the importance of modular cryptography to adapt to evolving threats, like quantum computing, and believe that cryptographic laws should govern data handling rather than inconsistent regulatory measures. Evervault envisions that developers will naturally choose to build encrypted applications if it enhances their experience without adding complexity, and they aim to make encryption an integral part of the development stack. Their approach is to support technological innovation while ensuring that privacy remains a fundamental human right, positioning their principles as a guide for the future of data privacy and security.

Evervault is advancing its mission to encrypt the web by developing E3, the Evervault Encryption Engine, which aims to provide developers with a robust encryption infrastructure. E3 is designed to perform cryptographic operations with low latency, high scalability, and extreme reliability, ensuring secure environments for key material. Evervault follows the principle that developers should use fully transparent cryptosystems, thus sharing comprehensive information about its services and infrastructure. The company explored various implementation options for encrypted data computation, such as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and trusted execution environments (TEEs), ultimately choosing AWS Nitro Enclaves due to their advanced capabilities and security features. E3 is written in Rust and operates within AWS Nitro Enclaves, providing cryptographic primitives that secure data processing without network exposure. The project underscores the importance of treating data as the ultimate security endpoint and aims to simplify encryption for developers, allowing them to create encrypted apps with end-to-end data security. Evervault is building Relay and Cages on top of E3, leveraging new advancements in cryptography and TEEs to spearhead a future where the web is encrypted.