Practices of backuping homomorphically encrypted databases

Abstract

Ideal homomorphic encryption is theoretically achievable but impractical in reality due to tremendous computing overhead. Homomorphically encrypted databases, such as CryptDB, leverage replication with partially homomorphic encryption schemes to support different SQL queries over encrypted data directly. These databases reach a balance between security and efficiency, but incur considerable storage overhead, especially when making backups. Unfortunately, general data compression techniques relying on data similarity exhibit inefficiency on encrypted data. We present CryptZip, a backup and recovery system that could highly reduce the backup storage cost of encrypted databases. The key idea is to leverage the metadata information of encryption schemes and selectively backup one or several columns among semantically redundant columns. The experimental results show that CryptZip could reduce up to 90.5% backup storage cost on TPC-C benchmark.