Alice Carruth (7:17)

Thanks, Maria. Maritime Launch Services is collaborating with Dutch aerospace company T Minus Engineering Great Name, to launch a hypersonic test platform from Spaceport Nova Scotia in October of this year. The Federal Communications Space Bureau has accepted Globalstar's C3 system petition for filing and published it for comment. If that goes through, it'll expand and evolve its mobile satellite services network and York Space System has completed a preliminary design review for the SDA's T2TL Gamma.

Maria Varmazis (7:47)

And where can we find out more about all of those stories?

Alice Carruth (7:49)

We include links to all the original sources of the stories we mentioned throughout the show in the Selected Reading section of our Show Notes. Those links can also be found on our website, visit space.n2k.com and click on this episode title.

Maria Varmazis (8:03)

Hey T Minus Crew. If you're just joining us, welcome and be sure to follow T Minus Space daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you could do us a favor, share this intel with your friends and coworkers. That's because a growing audience is the most important thing for us and we would love your help as part of the T Minus Crew. So if you find T Minus useful, and we always really hope that you do, please share the show so other professionals like you can find us. Thank you so much. It means a lot to me and all of us here at the T Minus Crew.

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Maria Varmazis (10:10)

Our guest today is Ellison Ann Williams, CEO at nVail. And I started by asking Ellison Ann to tell us more about her company.

Ellison Ann Williams (10:21)

We are a privacy enhancing technology company and build software to protect the usage of data. So when data is being used or processed. So that means when you're running a search over it, when you're running an analytic over it, when you're running a training, a machine learning model model or AI, which is the unit of work and AI. And so at the broadest level we enable organizations really of all types to be able to securely and privately use data where it is and as it is across all kinds of boundaries and silos in order to get insights from that data that otherwise they would have not been able to get.

Interview Host (10:57)

Data in use specifically has been a very difficult challenge from what I understand and that is what you all specialize in. So can you give me a sense of maybe the historical or the broader context of data encryption and what the challenges have been there?

Ellison Ann Williams (11:12)

So data has three states at its core from which all types of protection, including encryption derive. So the first state of data is at rest, which is most people's comfort zone in terms of familiarity with data. So that's going to be in the file system, in the database, things like that. The second state of data is moving around, so data in transit. And then the third state of data is data in use when it's being used or processed. And so that is the area where privacy enhancing technologies uniquely come in to provide value. And one of the core pillars of the privacy enhancing technology family is a special type of encryption called homomorphic encryption which allows you to do things like take a search that contains sensitive indicators, encrypt it and you're trusted walls, and then go run that search across all those boundaries and silos of data without ever decrypting it at any point during processing, so never exposing any of that sensitive content outside of your walls.

Interview Host (12:14)

And that's been historically very difficult to achieve or I imagine maybe very slow or actually I'm just guessing, yes, historically.

Ellison Ann Williams (12:22)

Extremely difficult, extremely slow. So that type of encryption, which like I said is one of the core kind of pillars of the pets family, has Been around for decades, but it' only been practical for the last, I would say eight, nine years or so, and then dramatically increasing in performance. So of course either where the technology is impossible at all or it's possible and not practical, which was the case with this specific technology. Nor does the market exist. So for us, you know, starting the company with some kind of breakthroughs in that kind of encryption that allowed it to be practical for the first time ever. It really gave us tremendous opportunity to now go create an entirely new market around this family of technologies and help people understand what they are and why they add value.

Interview Host (13:10)

Yeah, I was going to say you mentioned privacy enhancing technologies, which PETS I guess is the other the acronym for that. Yeah, yeah, tell me a bit about that. What does that mean exactly?

Ellison Ann Williams (13:22)

So privacy enhancing technologies are that family that protects the usage of data. So they're really three core pillars of the PETS family. So the first is that mouthful homomorphic encryption that we talked about. The second is something called secure multiparty computation. So beautifully named is exactly what you would expect. And then it allows multiple parties to securely compute together for an end outcome. It's a protocol which can or can't leverage types of encryption such as homomorphic encryption. And then finally the third core pillar is something called a trusted execution environment, which is a tiny little environment or enclave on the hardware kind of chip itself that's considered to be trusted. So you're going to move your hopeful encrypted data at rest and your encrypted operations, such as your searches, your analytics, your machine learning models into that tiny little environment within that. You're going to decrypt, you're going to perform your computation, you're going to re, encrypt and exit. So it has a perimeter based security model where the perimeter is really, really small and commercially you might hear it called confidential computing. So we solution in all of those areas. But that's the kind of nutshell version of privacy enhancing technology.

Interview Host (14:31)

Yeah, I was going to say this is, I just asked you to explain something that is an entire career for many people in a few senses.

Maria Varmazis (14:37)

So thank you, thank you for doing that.

Interview Host (14:40)

Those extremely complex ideas just boil down to a tiny nutshell. So this brings us to the space related contract that you all announced pretty recently. So congratulations with the Defense Innovation Unit. So tell me a bit about this contract. You're going to be working with the.

Maria Varmazis (14:54)

DIU or continuing your work with the.

Interview Host (14:56)

Diu, if I understand correctly.

Ellison Ann Williams (14:59)

Correct. So we've been a part of diu's hybrid Space architecture program for several years now. And so they have the kind of next generation instantiation of the hyperspace architecture program that they announced very recently. And of course we're kind of proud and honored to be a part of that. And remember, you know, as I said before, what privacy enhancing technologies do allow you to securely use data across all these kinds of boundaries and silos to get insights that you could have never gotten before. So of course, our space ecosystem globally and as a country is so heterogeneous and diverse. So we have of course, civilian kind of space assets, we have military space assets, and then the really growing community around commercial space assets. So the point of hybrid space architecture is, well, how do you leverage all of these kind of heterogeneous assets that we have access to as a country and do it in a way that of course is completely secure and private and data underpins all of that. So you can hear that boundaries and silos abound in space communities that we really come in and are able to provide that linchpin or cornerstone for secure, decentralized data usage across all of these different kinds of entities. And if you would have told me when I started this company nine years ago, sending out to create this kind of privacy enhancing technology market and things like that, that we would be in space, I probably would have laughed at you. It wasn't something that we set out to put pets in space, but as we've kind of walked this journey with Diu over the last few years, it makes 100% sense why pets are so important in this kind of space. Situational awareness, tactical surveillance, reconnaissance kind of mission portfolio for the US Government and for global types of communities as well.

Maria Varmazis (16:54)

Absolutely.

Interview Host (16:54)

And especially given the innovations that you've discussed about cryptographically in terms of what we've been able to achieve, and more recently with greater speed and accuracy. And given that space technology is moving in a similar path of we're able to do a lot more on orbit than we ever were before, much more quickly. It sounds like there's a really lovely convergence of abilities happening, that it's all sort of meeting at the right time right now.

Ellison Ann Williams (17:22)

Exactly, exactly. So of course we want to be able to utilize the best kind of space resources that we can as a country. And certainly kind of every country has that viewpoint. But like we talked about before, they're so diverse, different people and different companies are doing different things and then the equities are so different. So civilian space operations are going to be very different than for, for example, military types of space operations than from a commercial space perspective. But if you're conducting military operations, you have a whole different set of equities than maybe what the commercial space community has when they're out, you know, doing the things that they do as a business, as a community. So then how do you respect all those equities in each other's environments? And that's where privacy enhancing technologies can come in and play its role.

Maria Varmazis (18:06)

That's fascinating. Yeah, that is fascinating.

Interview Host (18:09)

And this feels like an obligatory question nowadays, but I know AI plays a part here as well. I'd love to hear more about that, for sure.

Ellison Ann Williams (18:16)

So privacy enhancing technologies have a very powerful role in the model centric security aspect of secure AI. So of course machine learning models are kind of the unit of work for AI or artificial intelligence. And as we all know very well now, but it has always been the case those machine learning models contain or encode the data over which they were trained. So if you've trained your model over data that you consider to be sensitive, then sending your model out of that training data location, say out into a commercial space provider or anywhere else is essentially the same thing, is taking that training data and moving it out of your environment. Clearly that's a huge problem if that data had any sensitivity to it whatsoever. So where privacy enhancing technologies come into play is that now they enable you to take that machine learning model and now you can encrypt that sensitive machine learning model and you can send the encrypted model out to run over data. So this is evaluation, inference or training. Right. To become smarter in a completely encrypted capacity. So if I never decrypt the model during inference or training, then I never have an opportunity to see the model. If I can't see the model or any of its outputs, then I can't pull out any of the data from the model over which it's been trained before. Nor can I really affect some of the more intelligent, adversarial machine learning attack vectors like model spoofing, data poisoning, things like that. So the net effect is privacy enhancing technologies. And that kind of model centric security aspect allows organizations to use these sensitive machine learning models in ways and places that they could have never done before. So that's super exciting. I love it when the security enables the business or the mission to do more, to get more value out of their data, out of their workflows and things like that. And of course you could see exactly how this would fit into the space world.

Interview Host (20:17)

Yeah, I was just going to ask about use cases there because my gears were turning when you were mentioning that about how much I know many commercial organizations would say there are capabilities that are not normally available to them, that this could open that possibility up to them in a secure manner. I'm curious your thoughts about what we could be seeing.

Ellison Ann Williams (20:36)

Yes. So encrypted federated learning or making your model smarter across all of these disparate space data assets is one application and one use case. So I want to go make my military kind of model smarter over all these kind of commercial geospatial providers. And how do I do that in a way that protects my model at all points during that training process? How do I do that in such a way that makes sure that my model isn't vulnerable to data poisoning and all kinds of different attack vectors? Right. And so privacy enhancing technologies would uniquely enable you to do that, but they also allow you to go run those models, these kind of edgy environments, in a completely secure way. And so edge environments get super interesting in the space world because not only are you talking about kind of physical ground based systems that are out at the edge, you're talking actually about things that are moving around on orbit in space.

Maria Varmazis (21:29)

Yep.

Interview Host (21:29)

I love asking organizations like yours that are doing work in the space domain where it wasn't necessarily where you thought you were going to be about maybe the unique considerations or challenges of working within the space domain and maybe any ways that you've had to adapt.

Ellison Ann Williams (21:43)

One of the interesting things that we have done is take a look at putting pets actually on orbit on these different kind of small form factor devices. And one of the considerations is not only kind of small hardware piece of it, that's actually not the big deal, it's bandwidth limitation.

Maria Varmazis (21:58)

Right.

Ellison Ann Williams (21:59)

So you only have uplink and downlink at certain times and in certain kind of positions. And so you have to make sure that the kind of encrypted searches, watch lists, models that you want to push up are kind of size appropriate and timed appropriately to get them up into orbit? And then of course, the encrypted results are timed in such a way and sized in such a way that you can get them down efficiently. So this is kind of timing, positioning, bandwidth consideration trifecta that you have to push on a little bit harder for kind of space orbit types of operations.

Maria Varmazis (22:49)

We'll be right back.

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Maria Varmazis (23:25)

Welcome back. A groundbreaking cancer drug named Ribexinib, which was developed by Aspera Biomedicines and UC San Diego's Sanford Stem Cell Institute, has advanced to FDA approved clinical trials. Well, what's that got to do with space, I hear you asking. Well, its approval comes after successful testing aboard an axiom space mission. AX2 to be precise. And this drug targets the ADAR1 gene, which enables cancer cells to clone and evade the immune system in microgravity conditions. On the International Space Station, Ribexinib effectively halted the growth of aggressive cancer organoids, outperforming existing treatments. The accelerated tumor growth in space allowed researchers to observe and test the drug's efficacy way more rapidly than on Earth. And Axiom isn't the only company working on space based testing for cancer treatment. A follow up to the Axiom mission has also been announced. Redwire Corporation has been awarded a contract by Aspero Biomedicines to use Red Wire's pharmaceutical in space laboratory technology known as Pillbox. The mission will analyze the crystal structure of the ADAR1P150 protein. I don't know what that means either, but I'm sure someone does, both with and without the presence of Ribexinib. The research aims to enhance drug formulations and expand the development of ADAR1 inhibitors, potentially offering new avenues in cancer treatments. The investigation is scheduled to launch later this year, and it just goes to show that collaboration between space and medical research represents a significant step forward towards innovative cancer treatments. If you're interested in learning more about medical research in microgravity, by the way, we will be covering it on this weekend's Deep Space episode. I'm going to be talking with Axiom's chief scientist, Dr. Lucy Lowe, about the science payloads going up to the ISS with the AX4 mission, which is due to launch on June 10. Definitely do not want to miss that episode. That's it for T minus for June 3, 2025, brought to you by N2K CyberWire for additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes notes@space.n2k.com we're privileged that N2K and podcasts like T Minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K Senior Producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltier. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. T minus.

Dave (26:47)

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