Enabling Secure Database as a Service using Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Challenges and Opportunities
This addresses the need for secure data outsourcing in cloud services, but is incremental as it builds on existing cryptographic and database work.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling secure database as a service by using fully homomorphic encryption for query processing, but notes that successful adoption remains a distant dream with numerous challenges to address.
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 also outline several other challenges that need to be addressed, while also describing the lessons that can be learnt from a decade of work by the database community in querying encrypted data.