Searching over encrypted data in cloud systems

Abstract

Security is still a major inhibitor of cloud computing. When companies are testing cloud applications, e.g. for storage or databases, they use generated data for fear of data loss. Modern encrypted databases where the cryptographic key remains at the client provide a solution to this problem. Recent results in cryptography, such order-preserving encryption, and database systems enable the practical use of these systems. We report on our pre-development efforts of implementing such an encrypted database in an in-memory, column store database. We highlight some unsolved research challenges: such as access control, infrequent queries and security vs. performance query optimization. Challenges to key management in multi-user environments remain largely unsolved. We give an overview of the architecture and performance benchmarks on our prototype which are very encouraging for practical adoption.