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Comment by bcg1 | Hacker News Reader

I realize that your post was titled "Hello World" so I wouldn't expect too much substance, but a couple quick questions (honest ones, not being sarcastic):

What is the use case for something like this?

Is this f/oss ... similarly, what are the licensing terms?

Quick comment:

Please don't misuse the word "hack" when you actually mean "security breach". Thanks!

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The use-cases could be, for example, payment processors storing customer data, encrypted webmail (where you're able to search w/o downloading all your emails), "encrypted evernote" :-)

Yes, it will be open source once available

Oh, sounds good. So even though you can't get at the data on the server, you are able verify that it is unchanged with correct timestamps, etc. Sounds smart, useful. I presume then that you can support searching on the client side by downloading an encrypted index or something like that?

Thanks for the good work guys, best of luck with your project and (ad)venture.

We support client-side search, that' the whole point. But we don't even have to download all the index, only log(index_size)

That's for full text search? This sounds really cool! Excuse the not-very-sophisticated question because I'm not really familiar with the data structures a database typically uses, how do your index sizes compare to a typical sql database or similar indexed similarly for the same sort of queries?

Index sizes are pretty similar (consider the same).

Having the index end-to-end encrypted imposes some limitations though. You have to do several requests when you want to do one query which is obviously slower. Though, still practical.

And since the CPU logic happens on the client, in some cases (many simultaneous clients) the performance can be actually better.

Yes, it will be open-source, we're still figuring out the correct license. Thanks for the "hack" -> "security breach" correction.

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