Fast query over encrypted character data in database

Zheng-Fei Wang (Department of Computer and Information Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China; Department of Computer and Electron Engineer, Hunan Business College, Changsha, China)

Abstract

There are a lot of very important data in database, which need to be protected from attacking. Cryptographic support is an important mechanism of securing them. People, however, must tradeoff performance to ensure the security because the operation of encryption and decryption greatly degrades query performance. To solve such a problem, an approach is proposed that can implement SQL query on the encrypted character data. When the character data are stored in the form of cipher, we not only store the encrypted character data, but also turn the character data into the characteristic values via a characteristic function, and store them in an additional field. When querying the encrypted character data, we apply the principle of two-phase query. Firstly, we implement a coarse query over the encrypted data in order to filter the records not related to the querying conditions. Secondly, we decrypt the rest records and implement a refined query over them again. Results of a set of experiments validate the functionality and usability of our approach.

Keywords

database security, characteristic values, coarse query, refined query

Full Text (PDF format)

Published 1 January 2004