A Long-Awaited Defense Against Data Leaks May Have Just Arrived

The world has been left desperate for tools to stem the flow of sensitive personal data after years of data breeches.

Users of the database will be able to search their data while it remains locked up. The tool tries to bridge academic cryptography findings and real world environments so users can adopt the feature without needing advanced theoretical expertise. Users don't have to re-architect their systems before they can take advantage of it, and it's built to work with existing databases.

When it's traveling across networks or sitting in storage, institutions from businesses to governments rely on encryption to render data unintelligible. When data is being used for legitimate reasons, such as looking up a patient's medical records, it's not protected. An attacker, including a rogue employee, could potentially gain access to data in the same way a doctor or customer service agent would. The database maker MongoDB has been working on possible solutions for a long time. The company claims to have one.

This is what customers are looking for. Everyone wants better assurances and we work with the biggest banks, pension systems, treasury exchanges and payment networks. The practical engineering breakthrough made it possible for it to work on big databases.

Without knowing which dates flagged the system, a bank agent could investigate your account for possible fraud on a number of dates. It could allow a customer service rep to type the first few letters of a name in order to start a claims process.

Seny Kamara and his partner, Tarik Moataz, were responsible for many of the breakthrough discoveries. Aroki Systems was founded several years ago by the pair and John Partridge. Aroki collaborated with MongoDB on a database security feature that was announced in 2019. The acquisition of Aroki by MongoDB took place in 2021.

Kamara and Moataz have been working on an area of cryptanalysis known as structured encryption for a long time. The approach involves encrypting the data with a specific architecture so that it can't be read without a special token. Users can use other techniques to do computations on encrypted data. Structured encrypting data so that it can be found without exposing the data itself.