Stony Brook University Computer Science

Jason W.S. Yee from Virtru will be giving a talk on "Data That Defends Itself: Zero Trust, ABAC, and AI Agents". This seminar is open to all.

Please find the seminar details below:
Title: Data That Defends Itself: Zero Trust, ABAC, and AI Agents
Subtitle: Who gets to read a file? A live, zero trust demo of attribute-based access with OpenTDF, and why role-based access breaks at scale.
Date & Time: Friday, November 20, 2 PM
Venue: B206

Abstract
Who gets to read a file? Most organizations answer with roles: join the "finance-reader" group and you can open finance files. That works until requirements pile up. Every new condition, such as region, seniority, or project, multiplies the roles someone has to create, assign, and remember to revoke. And once a file is emailed or downloaded, the role check stays behind with the system it came from.
This session is a live demonstration of the alternative: attribute-based access control (ABAC) built on OpenTDF, the open-source foundation of Virtru's data security platform. Zero trust is usually applied around data, at networks, devices, and logins. OpenTDF applies it to the data itself. Each encrypted file carries its own access policy, and every attempt to open it is checked against who the requester is right now, not what a login token said earlier. We'll encrypt four documents and open them as five users who all hold the identical role yet get five different results. We'll watch a senior executive get denied because of where she works, and revoke a user's access instantly on a token she already holds.
We'll also look under the hood. The whole policy is driven from the command line with otdfctl, OpenTDF's admin tool: attribute definitions with hierarchy rules, condition sets that match identity-record fields, mappings that turn them into entitlements, and per-user tokens for every decrypt. The demo was built with an AI coding agent. I directed it, and every claim it made was verified by running tests against a live stack. We'll talk honestly about where that helped, where it went wrong, and how testing caught it. No security or AI background required.

Speaker Bio
Jason Yee is a Forward Deployed Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer at Virtru, where he helps government customers protect sensitive data using OpenTDF, an open standard designed to keep access controls with the data wherever it goes. A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and Certified Kubernetes Admin/Application Developer (CKA/CKAD), his expertise spans cybersecurity, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and data science.