MongoDB’s Queryable Encryption — Long-Awaited Defense Against Data Leaks

MongoDB claims its new “Queryable Encryption” lets users search their databases while sensitive data stays encrypted. And the best part, its cryptography is open source.

Queryable Encryption could let a bank agent investigate your account for possible fraud on a range of dates without knowing which dates specifically flagged the system. Or it could allow a customer service rep to type the first few letters of a name and start a claims process while leaving the name encrypted and indecipherable.

The approach involves encrypting data with a specific architecture so it can be searched with special tokens specific to each query without data ever being decrypted. Other techniques such as homomorphic encryption allow users to do computations on encrypted data, like adding two columns in an encrypted spreadsheet. But structured encryption is specifically focused on organizing encrypted data so it can be found without exposing the data itself.

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