Data Privacy

Despite the permissionless and public nature of blockchains and our mining system, Heurist integrates Lit Protocol to enable encryption of data in transit, which includes the input and output of AI inference. This section outlines the encryption/decryption processes designed to protect privacy.

Two sets of miners

1. Public miners: anyone with a GPU meeting the minimum requirements can become a public miner permissionlessly. Data is not encrypted.

2. Privacy-enabled miners: trusted node operators can become miners handling sensitive information such as confidential documents, health records, and user identity data. Such miners should adhere to off-chain privacy policies. In-transit data is encrypted. The Router and Sequencer of Heurist Protocol cannot decrypt the data. Only the miner with a matching EVM wallet specified by user's access control condition (ACC) can decrypt the data

Privacy-enabled miners are trusted third parties whose trust can be established through two primary methods. (1) off-chain consensus, such as IRL laws or agreements, which is technically straightforward to implement. (2) utilizing Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to ensure secure and confidential processing of sensitive data. While there isn't currently a robust solution for large AI models within TEE, recent advancements in hardware, such as the latest chips by Nvidia, show promise in supporting TEE for AI workloads.

Heurist is actively exploring emerging technologies to further enhance the privacy and security guarantees for privacy-enabled miners, ensuring that sensitive data remains protected throughout the AI inference process.