Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview

mongodb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 69 posts

Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview

#11

Post by redwood »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #10

This is a really neat technology, but I don't understand it's use case. I've worked in HealthTech and currently in the compliance space. I'm skeptical of Mongo's claims (and their familiarity with compliance laws). Kind of feels like a solution in search of a problem. "In use" implies that you have a need to process that data. It doesn't matter if the end client is submitting queries in plain text (protected in trans…

I see this as more about fundamental trust.. confidentiality from the service providers, not compliance

Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview

#13

Post by samwillis »

uberdru wrote: post #8

seriously did not think we would see homomorphic encryption productized for a few more years. pretty impressive!

Homomorphic encryption allows you to modify the encrypted data without decrypting it or even knowing the the content. I don’t think this is homomorphic encryption.

If they are able to do this without decrypting the data then I think you could describe this as a somewhat week encryption that exposes some data attributes as queryable. You could not implement this with strong encryption without at least decrypting for indexing.

Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview

#14

Post by uberdru »

8jy89hui wrote: post #9
uberdru wrote: post #8

seriously did not think we would see homomorphic encryption productized for a few more years. pretty impressive!

> Some of the existing tools, such as homomorphic encryption or secure enclaves have performance unsuited to scalable encrypted search, require proprietary hardware, or have uncertain security properties. I don't think this is exactly homomorphic. I hope they put out a whitepaper so researchers can properly evaluate its security.

Nice catch, I was scanning for homomorphic encryption, but missed this. Have no idea how else they would implement this.

Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview

#15

Post by tyingq »

eknkc wrote: post #7

I didn't know this was a thing. The article mentions it can do equality, range, prefix, suffix and substring queries. Does this mean that the encryption scheme creates sortable 1:1 mapped results after encryption? Kind of like a shift cipher?

They mention this:

"Queryable Encryption was designed by MongoDB’s Advanced Cryptography Research Group, headed by Seny Kamara and Tarik Moataz"

Some related papers with those two as authors:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/453.pdf

https://cs.brown.edu/people/seny/pubs/sgx.pdf

Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview

#16

Post by Diggsey »

api wrote: post #12

Is this actually possible? Couldn't you make many repeated queries and slowly decrypt the text by e.g. slowly narrowing the range?

Yeah the article is very thin on technical details. To make this work as they describe, it must not be possible for any client to "forge" queries, or else they could trivially decode the content by sending prefix queries of increasing length.

It's also difficult to see how this could work on the server side without exposing some information about the encrypted fields. For example, if all documents have a value that begins with "a", then there must exist a prefix query that matches all those documents. I would expect it to be possible to figure out whether such a query is possible or not, only given access to the encrypted data, but even if that's not possible, the simple fact that a prefix query was issued that matched all documents gives away that information.

Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview

#17

Post by xhkkffbf »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #10

This is a really neat technology, but I don't understand it's use case. I've worked in HealthTech and currently in the compliance space. I'm skeptical of Mongo's claims (and their familiarity with compliance laws). Kind of feels like a solution in search of a problem. "In use" implies that you have a need to process that data. It doesn't matter if the end client is submitting queries in plain text (protected in trans…

In one of the books about the general idea, _Translucent Databases_, the idea is to save the costs of securing the raw data. Someone might break into the database server (or listen on the wire) and find only encrypted values. This can make many different architectural use cases easier to deliver.

In the most extreme cases, the unencrypted values never leave the client. The database can concentrate on delivering storage and fast query answers without paying much attention to issues of security. Clients don't need to trust the database because they control the encryption.

Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview

#18

Post by dandraper »

This feature is a result of MongoDB's acquisition of Aroki. It looks like a good product but we actually beat them to it with https://cipherstash.com/activestash

CipherStash works with any Database and also supports Range queries and sorting/ordering. We do it in the application layer. Only supports Ruby so far but C#, Java, Python, Rust are in the works.

Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview

#19

Post by jayd16 »

8jy89hui wrote: post #6
rafaelturk wrote: post #2

This looks really cool. Albeit feels that it is actually a feature implemented in the driver (client side) so my initial impression is that is not a meanignfull innovation on the server side. This can be implemented with any Database, even with current MongoDBs

> This can be implemented with any Database, even with current MongoDBs Is it really all client side? How could they do things like substring matching without sending the entire index back and forth to the client? The graphic seems to show the query being executed solely on the server (although graphics often lie).

Perhaps encrypted trigrams (or some such thing) are sent during insert and search.

Then it's just a matter of counting matching trigrams/chunks. The server doesn't need to know how to read the trigrams.

Post reply on HN