Wired: $MDB & Their New Encryption Suite

https://twitter.com/peregreine/status/1534214627235663872

1) $MDB Wired Magazine has an interesting piece about MondoDog’s new encryption suite to keep all your data safe from hackers:

Wired Headline: A Long-Awaited Defense Against Data Leaks May Have Just Arrived

Subheadline: MongoDB claims its new “Queryable Encryption” lets users search their databases while sensitive data stays encrypted. Oh, and its cryptography is open source.

https://archive.ph/8Sau0

AFTER YEARS OF data breaches, leaks, and hacks leaving the world desperate for tools to stem the illicit flow of sensitive personal data, a key advance has appeared on the horizon.

On Tuesday, MongoDB is announcing “Queryable Encryption,” a feature that will allow database users to search their data while it remains encrypted. The tool, which is debuting in preview as part of MongoDB 6.0, attempts to bridge academic cryptography findings and real-world environments so users can adopt the feature without needing advanced theoretical expertise. Crucially, Queryable Encryption is built to work with existing databases rather than requiring users to re-architect their systems before they can take advantage of it.

Institutions from businesses to governments, health care facilities, and critical infrastructure already lean on encryption to render data unintelligible (and therefore not worth stealing) when it’s traveling across networks or sitting in storage. But none of that protects data when it’s actively being used for legitimate reasons—looking up a patient’s medical records, say, or setting up a car rental reservation. That means an attacker—including a rogue employee—could potentially gain access to data the same way a doctor or customer service agent does. This is a nut everyone wants to crack, and the database maker MongoDB has been working on possible solutions for years. Now, the company says, it has one.

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I’ve read this for a third time now, and this is bigger than I realized. The fact $MDB owns Aroki Systems is enough for me to buy into this company now:

https://archive.ph/8Sau0

Though Tuesday’s release will be the first time that the public can vet Queryable Encryption in the wild, Aroki Systems had cryptographer JP Aumasson conduct technical due diligence on the cryptographic underpinning of their prototype system. And MongoDB invited University of Chicago cryptographer and searchable encryption researcher David Cash to take an early look as well. Both told WIRED that while they haven’t audited the entire system deployment, the underlying cryptography appears sound. And they both emphasize that it’s exciting to see a real-world searchable encryption scheme take shape after so long.

“A lot of crypto research since the 1980s has sort of been centered on how do we do this stuff, so this is a long time coming," Cash says. “Everything in cryptography is about trade-offs, and the world is complicated, so it’s important to be careful about absolute statements, but that this vision is realized in some form is very exciting. And this is not at all snake oil or security theater. They’re going deep on this and thinking about the important stuff carefully.”

Aumasson says that many others have claimed to offer searchable encryption without the technical depth or capability. “There have been other products advertising encrypted search, but academics would really laugh at those,” he says. “What Mongo is doing is something that is academic-compliant, and I’m very happy to see it.”

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