OpAwesome : The Good , the Bad , and the Fuzzy in the Secure Database Landscape

Cloud data storage and computation are increasingly important for both personal users and corporations, driven by a few industry trends: the quantity of data increasing, the cost of cloud storage falling, and users increasingly expecting to access their data from anywhere. However, several high profile data breaches over the past few years have made it apparent that storing data on a vulnerable cloud is no different than handing that data directly to the adversary. At one extreme, users could securely encrypt the entirety of the data they would like to store, but this prevents the cloud service provider from doing any computation other than storing the data and shipping it back to the user on this front cryptography systems based on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) are still currently performance prohibitive. Secure databases attempt to bridge the gap between fully functional data storage and fully secure data storage. Current state of the art secure databases claim to be within 5X latency of commercial plaintext databases on small datasets with support for most query types [Fuller et al., 2015].