Searchable Encryption to Reduce Encryption Degradation in Adjustably Encrypted Databases

Processing queries on encrypted data protects sensitive data stored in cloud databases. CryptDB has introduced the approach of adjustable encryption for such processing. A database column is adjusted to the necessary level of encryption, e.g. order-preserving, for the set of executed queries, but never reversed. This has the drawback that long running cloud databases will eventually transform into only order-preserving encrypted databases. In this paper we propose searchable encryption as an alternative in order to reduce this encryption degradation. It maintains security while only marginally impacting performance when applied only to infrequently used queries for searching. We present a budget-based encryption selection algorithm as part of query planning for making the appropriate choice between searchable and deterministic or order-preserving encryption. We evaluate our algorithm on a long-tail distributed TPC-C benchmark on an experimental implementation of encrypted queries in an in-memory database. In one choice of parameters our algorithm incurs only a \(1.5\%\) performance penalty, but one of 15 columns is not decrypted to order-preserving or deterministic encryption. Our selection algorithm is configurable, such that higher security gains are possible at the cost of performance.