Neat. Did they fix their blog's pagination yet? If you hit next enough times you may or may not be able to take down the site, don't ask me how I know.
(their pagination is implemented just by increasing the limit parameter).
MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview
#62I call bullshit. So let me get this right - its encrypted but you cansearch prefix and suffix? So all the attacker has to do is do it one letter at a time, see if it starts with A, B, C, once they figure that out, go to the next letter and so on. (I presume that the DB is not supposed to be trusted since they make such a big fuss about only being decryptable on the client side) Also there doesn't seem to be a whitepa…
The use case you're outlining is someone already has access to the database. They can just do a find() in that case and get everything, no query required. You're basically describing an lz77 SSL hack that's like 20 years old, I'm pretty sure they would think of this. The use case here is just "advanced encryption at rest". Encrypting at rest is one thing, but this means people are less likely to see PII by accident,…
That's not what their blog post says. To quote:
"Queryable Encryption implements a fast, searchable scheme that allows the server to process queries on fully encrypted data, without knowing anything about the data. The data and the query itself remain encrypted at all times on the server."
They are strongly implying that the someone with access to the database should not be able to decrypt the data. According to their blog post that seems to be the entire value proposition compared to what they describe as traditional encryption at rest.
Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview
#63I call bullshit. So let me get this right - its encrypted but you cansearch prefix and suffix? So all the attacker has to do is do it one letter at a time, see if it starts with A, B, C, once they figure that out, go to the next letter and so on. (I presume that the DB is not supposed to be trusted since they make such a big fuss about only being decryptable on the client side) Also there doesn't seem to be a whitepa…
It’s already been mentioned that “Queryable Encryption was designed by MongoDB’s Advanced Cryptography Research Group, headed by Seny Kamara and Tarik Moataz" - are you calling bullshit on their work? What are your qualifications?
So long as whatever system they designed has not been published and reviewed by independent experts, then yes. I don't have to be an expert in this space to recognize what the norms are for making new production ready cryptosystems are, and that this doesn't remotely meet them.
Designing secure cryptosystems is hard. Experts fail at it all the time. The lack of technical details is a major red flag.
Not to mention the distinct possibility that even if this group made a secure system, the mongodb marketing dept may very well be misrepresenting its security/limitations.
Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I've been looking for more information and I can't really see any indication as to how they are planning on implementing it. The whole thing seems more like marketing than actual innovation: searching encrypted data isn't that complicated if you are always dealing with the entire ciphertext, it's just another string in that use case.
> searching encrypted data isn't that complicated if you are always dealing with the entire ciphertext, it's just another string in that use case. This isn't really true because there are multiple ciphertexts that can decode to the same plaintext in any modern encryption algorithm. If you skip that property you weaken the encryption. (Chosen plaintext attacks)
it's not complicated if they are using deterministic encryption - which brings it's own issues
Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The use case you're outlining is someone already has access to the database. They can just do a find() in that case and get everything, no query required. You're basically describing an lz77 SSL hack that's like 20 years old, I'm pretty sure they would think of this. The use case here is just "advanced encryption at rest". Encrypting at rest is one thing, but this means people are less likely to see PII by accident,…
That's not what their blog post says. To quote: "Queryable Encryption implements a fast, searchable scheme that allows the server to process queries on fully encrypted data, without knowing anything about the data. The data and the query itself remain encrypted at all times on the server." They are strongly implying that the someone with access to the database should not be able to decrypt the data. According to thei…
To me this is not what it means. To me it just means I can autocomplete emails etc while not storing the raw, unencrypted email value on the server.
Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
These things are indeed possible while maintaining fully semantically secure encryption. Recent, mostly theoretical work shows that this is possible using fully homomorphic encryption. The basic idea is, the client can encrypt its query, the server can process the encrypted query and produce an encrypted result, and send this back to the client. It sounds impossible, but it isn’t! Very cool stuff. There are actually…
Yeah, they contrast their method with homomorphic encryption, which makes me share your suspicion
Searchable encryption trades privacy for efficiency. However, the privacy loss can be tuned. For example, SE constructions will specify whether they leak search-pattern (how many of the same queries a client makes), access-pattern (the frequencies with which different items are accessed) or other things. Usually, a client can pay in storage/bandwidth to mitigate these leakages.
Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related video explaining encryption schemes to make encrypted data in a DB queryable: CryptDB: Processing Queries on an Encrypted Database https://youtu.be/xsaXMUelOEA?t=807
I was under the impression that cryptdb "encryption" was thoroughly broken. Am i mistaken? E.g. googling i found http://cs.brown.edu/people/seny/pubs/edb.pdf
Not broken according to the response to that paper:
the conclusions drawn by this paper with regard to CryptDB's guarantees for medical applications are incorrect: had the guidelines been followed, none of the claimed attacks would have been possible. [1]
Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview
#68This is really neat. Recently I explored similar functionality for relational databases and only got as far as implementing column-level encryption [0] in this Go library [1], but without support for querying the encrypted data. HashiCorp Vault's transit secrets engine supports Convergent Encryption [2] which provides limited ability to query the encrypted data, but I haven't yet experimented with it. If anyone is do…
The MuchPIR project (https://github.com/ReverseControl/MuchPIR) implements Information-Theoretic Private Information Retrieval (IT-PIR) in Postgresql; In addition to the demo there is a high performance version available for commercial use.
Re: MongoDB Releases Queryable Encryption Preview
#69seriously did not think we would see homomorphic encryption productized for a few more years. pretty impressive!
Homomorphic Encryption is available at large scale today for limited use cases.
See the MuchPIR project (https://github.com/ReverseControl/MuchPIR) which implements Information-Theoretic Private Information Retrieval (IT-PIR) in Postgresql; In addition to the demo there is a high performance version available for commercial use.