Enigma 2023

After 20+ years of academic research in cryptography, it is now possible—and practical—to search fully encrypted data. But the demands of high-performance distributed systems present unique challenges unaddressed by most research models of encrypted search, particularly for running rich, expressive queries. This talk will break down the major milestones along the journey from academia to the modern day developer ecosystem. We describe a technique called Structured Encryption which addresses the problem of encrypting structured data in such a way that it can be efficiently and privately queried. We will unpack common misconceptions in the security community around private search, touching briefly on several current approaches, with the balance of the talk focused on an implementation of Structured Encryption and lessons learned from recent work to open source and natively integrate the capability into one of the most widely used databases in the world.