Suppose I am storing a number of encrypted documents in a database. I would like

Question

Suppose I am storing a number of encrypted documents in a database. I would like to make it possible to identify the subset of documents whose contents match user-specified search terms without a) maintaining a plaintext index or b) decrypting documents on the fly. Is there any way to accomplish this securely?

By the same token, I'm wondering if a collection of encrypted documents can be sorted according to an encrypted attribute (e.g., document title) without first decrypting all attribute values.

Explanation / Answer

Yes. If you encrypt the documents with this purpose in mind (you have to use a special kind of encryption algorithm), then yes, it is possible to do this, for certain kinds of search queries.

There is a rich research literature on this topic. The buzzword is "search on encrypted data". I'll point you to a few sample papers in this space. Do a literature search, and you should be able to find many more for yourself.

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