Paper 2016/591

Arx: A Strongly Encrypted Database System

Rishabh Poddar and Tobias Boelter and Raluca Ada Popa

Abstract

In recent years, encrypted databases have emerged as a promising direction that provides data confidentiality without sacrificing functionality: queries are executed on encrypted data. However, existing practical proposals rely on a set of weak encryption schemes that have been shown to leak sensitive data. In this paper, we propose Arx, the first practical and functionally rich database system that encrypts the data only with strong encryption schemes. Arx protects the database with the same level of security as regular AES-based encryption, which by itself is devoid of functionality. We show that Arx supports real applications such as ShareLatex and a health data cloud provider, and that its performance overhead is modest.

Note: A shorter version of this paper is in submission.