Review of "CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing"

This paper addresses an issue that has become increasingly more important as of late, viewable as an issue even to those not involved in the software community. Data breaches are becoming increasingly more common, and increasingly more devastating, so encryption of sensitive data is very important. Having a DB that makes this directly in to its storage seems very promising.

The main nugget is to store the data in an encrypted format inside of the DB, but store it such that SQL queries are still able to execute over the data. This is made possible because SQL has a specific subset of operations that it will run, and thus the encryption scheme can be aware of these operations. Though sometimes data will need to be decrypted for certain operations, CryptDB attempts to minimize the amount of data that is decrypted.

I cannot say exactly why this is new work - perhaps partially because security has become an increasingly larger concern as more data is stored online and data hacking has become increasingly widespread and damaging.

The primary trade-off here is resource cost vs security. A fully homomorphic cryptography scheme would provide even better security, since it could execute all of the necessary operations without decrypting data, but would be very prohibitively CPU intensive. CryptDB attempts to provide security while still providing reasonable real-world performance, and seems to do a good job at this.

I can see this being influential in 10 years -- companies are being slammed harder and harder by data breaches and anything that can remedy this must pique the interest of many large companies.