Keynote

Abstract: In recent years, we have witnessed an upsurge in cyber-attacks and data breach incidents that put tremendous data at risk, affect millions of users, and cause severe economic losses. As an in-depth defence to counter the persistent and pervasive security threats, maintaining data in always encrypted form is becoming a trend and even a regulatory requirement. Satisfying the demand is particularly challenging in the context of databases, which, as a pillar in modern computing infrastructure, provide indispensable means to organize, store and retrieve data at different scales. The difficulty lies in how to perform the database query processing over encrypted data while meeting the requirements of security, performance, and complex query functions.

This field has grown tremendously over the past two decades, though there is no dominant solution that is universally applicable. Solutions based on cryptographic techniques, e.g., searchable encryption or property-preserving encryption, can efficiently provide certain primitive operations for database queries. But studies have shown that their allowed leakage profiles can be (sometimes highly) exploitable. The recent advent of secure hardware enclaves opens up new opportunities. Yet, the first few enclave-based proposals mostly explore extreme design points that rest on strong assumptions (e.g., huge enclave) or result in weak security (e.g., leaking relations of ciphertexts). In this talk, we will overview these latest advancements and the potential challenges, respectively, and discuss the possible roadmap ahead towards practically more secure, efficient and functional encrypted databases.