Indexing Encrypted Data

Indexing, searching, and sorting data are related functions that all have requirements that contradict the needs of secure data encryption. Indexing, searching, and related functionality requires you to assign order to your data. Order, in turn, depends on recognizing patterns in your data. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the security of encryption algorithms depends on eliminating recognizable patterns from your data. This renders encrypted data essentially useless in terms of efficient search and sort.