Enabling secure query processing in the cloud using fully homomorphic encryption
Murali Mani · 2013
The database community, at least for the last decade, has been grappling with querying encrypted data, which would enable secure database as a service solutions. A recent breakthrough in the cryptographic community (in 2009) related to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) showed that arbitrary computation on encrypted data is possible. Successful adoption of FHE for query processing is, however, still a distant dream, and numerous challenges have to be addressed. One challenge is how to perform algebraic query processing of encrypted data, where we produce encrypted intermediate results and operations on encrypted data can be composed. In this paper, we describe our solution for algebraic query processing of encrypted data and outline several other challenges that need to be investigated, while also describing the lessons that can be learnt from a decade of work by database community in querying encrypted data.