SPDE - A Database Encryption Layer on Top of MySQL

In this talk, we describe the challenges of prototyping a database encryption layer based on a server side encryption scheme – SPDE. SPDE a product of research conducted at Ben-Gurion University, faces many challenges common to most systems that attempt to add a database security layer: (1) Existing mechanisms of the database engine are either close-sourced or too complex to change without internal implementation changes; (2) A practical solution should not require substantial changes to the application that access the database; (3) Performance is a central aspect that tends to outweigh security when overhead is too high.

We report our experience in addressing these challenges prototyping SPDE as part of the functions that access files in MySQL;

We compare the performance of this implementation to that of Oracle’s TDE – Database Encryption: we show that the encryption layer be implemented is superior both in terms of its performance and security.