Privacy-preserving queries on encrypted data

Abstract

Data confidentiality is a major concern in database systems. Encryption is a useful tool for protecting the confidentiality of sensitive data. However, when data is encrypted, performing queries becomes more challenging. In this paper, we study efficient and provably secure methods for queries on encrypted data stored in an outsourced database that may be susceptible to compromise. Specifically, we show that, in our system, even if an intruder breaks into the database and observes some interactions between the database and its users, he only learns very little about the data stored in the database and the queries performed on the data. Our work consists of several components. First, we consider databases in which each attribute has a finite domain and give a basic solution for certain kinds of queries on such databases. Then, we present two enhanced solutions, one with a stronger security guarantee and the other with accelerated queries. In addition to providing proofs of our security guarantees, we provide empirical performance evaluations. Our experiments demonstrate that our solutions are fast on large-sized real data. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.