Micro-Benchmarking Property Preserving Encryption: Balancing Performance, Security and Functionality

Practical encryption systems with new and more flexible capabilities have been enabled by recent advances in computing hardware performance and Property Preserving Encryption (PPE) schemes. PPE schemes allow limited and preselected operations to be performed on encrypted data allowing system designers to trade-off between performance, security and functionality. This paper uses micro-benchmark to evaluate three interdependent factors of PPE: performance, security and functionality. The findings validate the efficacy of this technique and provide guidance to application designers and technology evaluators seeking to understand these interdependent relationships for PPE database applications. Experiments were performed using the CryptDB research system. Results validate the previous assessments of CryptDB and provide supplemental detail on performance, security and functionality.