Cryptography for AI and Data Systems

A workshop on the cryptographic problems that have become urgent in
the last few years specifically because of how AI and data systems
have evolved. We cover differential privacy (the most production-
deployed privacy-preserving technology), federated learning and its
real security properties, homomorphic encryption and where it's
actually tractable, secure multi-party computation, and the emerging
infrastructure for model provenance and content authenticity (C2PA,
attested training, watermarking). Two hands-on segments, with strong
emphasis on which technique fits which threat — and on reading vendor
claims critically.

Developers working on AI products who need to think about privacy
and provenance, ML engineers who keep getting privacy questions from
security teams, security engineers evaluating AI vendor claims, and
product or policy people who need to know what's possible versus
marketing. You should be comfortable with basic Python, basic
statistics (mean, variance, probability distribution), and basic
crypto vocabulary. You don't need to know any machine learning
beyond “models have weights and produce predictions.” The workshop
is framed as “current state and trajectory as of mid-2026” rather
than as a definitive reference — the space moves on a quarterly
basis and the principles outlast the specifics.

About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

More About Brian »