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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

I call bullshit.

So let me get this right - its encrypted but you cansearch prefix and suffix?

So all the attacker has to do is do it one letter at a time, see if it starts with A, B, C, once they figure that out, go to the next letter and so on. (I presume that the DB is not supposed to be trusted since they make such a big fuss about only being decryptable on the client side)

Also there doesn't seem to be a whitepaper detailing algorithms or their threat model. Bitcoin scams try harder then this.

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The use case you're outlining is someone already has access to the database. They can just do a find() in that case and get everything, no query required. You're basically describing an lz77 SSL hack that's like 20 years old, I'm pretty sure they would think of this.

The use case here is just "advanced encryption at rest". Encrypting at rest is one thing, but this means people are less likely to see PII by accident, for example.

That's not what their blog post says. To quote:

"Queryable Encryption implements a fast, searchable scheme that allows the server to process queries on fully encrypted data, without knowing anything about the data. The data and the query itself remain encrypted at all times on the server."

They are strongly implying that the someone with access to the database should not be able to decrypt the data. According to their blog post that seems to be the entire value proposition compared to what they describe as traditional encryption at rest.

To me this is not what it means. To me it just means I can autocomplete emails etc while not storing the raw, unencrypted email value on the server.

It’s already been mentioned that “Queryable Encryption was designed by MongoDB’s Advanced Cryptography Research Group, headed by Seny Kamara and Tarik Moataz" - are you calling bullshit on their work? What are your qualifications?

So long as whatever system they designed has not been published and reviewed by independent experts, then yes. I don't have to be an expert in this space to recognize what the norms are for making new production ready cryptosystems are, and that this doesn't remotely meet them.

Designing secure cryptosystems is hard. Experts fail at it all the time. The lack of technical details is a major red flag.

Not to mention the distinct possibility that even if this group made a secure system, the mongodb marketing dept may very well be misrepresenting its security/limitations.

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