Encrypted Search: from Research to Real-World Systems

The problem of designing end-to-end encrypted systems, and databases in particular, has driven the cryptography research community to study the problem of “searching on encrypted data” for about two decades. This sub-area of cryptography, known as Encrypted Search, has grown tremendously and several approaches have been proposed to encrypt databases, outsource them, and perform encrypted queries on them. In this talk, we are going to cover the state of the art in Encrypted Search, which is applicable to both on-premises and cloud-based systems. In particular, we will go over the different cryptographic primitives, their advantages, limitations, and readiness towards a real-world deployment. To illustrate the concept of end-to-end encryption, we will present a demo of the Aroki SAFE client-side API that makes on-prem and cloud-based Elasticsearch end-to-end encrypted.

Presenter: Tarik Moataz is co-founder and CTO of Aroki Systems (https://aroki.com) and a visiting scientist at Brown University. He is co-director of the Encrypted Systems Lab at Brown University. His research includes major advances in encrypted search that have appeared at the top cryptography conferences, including IACR CRYPTO, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt and Real-World Crypto.