Fast, Secure Encryption for Indexing in a Column-Oriented DBMS

Networked information systems require strong security guarantees because of the new threats that they face. Various forms of encryption have been proposed to deal with this problem. In a database system, there are often two contradictory goals: security of the encryption and fast performance of queries. There have been a number of proposals of database encryption schemes to facilitate queries on encrypted columns. Order-preserving encryption techniques are well-suited for databases since they support a simple, and efficient way to build indices. However, as we will show, they are insecure under straightforward attack scenarios. We propose a new light-weight database encryption scheme (called FCE) for column stores in data warehouses with trusted servers. The low decryption overhead of FCE makes comparisons of ciphertexts and hence indexing operations very fast. Since it is hard to use classical security definitions in cryptography to prove the security of any existing symmetric encryp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Tingjian Ge, Stanley B. Zdonik
• Keywords: Database, Database Encryption Scheme, ICDE 2007, Order-preserving Encryption Techniques, Symmetric Encryption Scheme