CryptDB is cool, but be very careful if you're thinking about actually using it for anything. Muhammad Naveed, Seny Kamara, and I have a paper appearing at ACM

CryptDB is cool, but be very careful if you're thinking about actually using it for anything. Muhammad Naveed, Seny Kamara, and I have a paper appearing at ACM CCS next month where we show that the approach used in CryptDB and other similar systems is vulnerable to a raft of statistical attacks. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/senyk/pubs/edb.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/senyk/pubs/edb... The problem happens when you have a sensitive field in the DB, and you actually need to run queries on that field for your app to function. CryptDB will "peel the onion back" so that your column is protected with a weaker deterministic or order-preserving encryption primitive in order to let the queries succeed. But then you're vulnerable to the statistical attacks that we describe in our paper. Of course, the CryptDB authors are smart people, so they foresaw some of this. They describe functionality in their tool for marking certain columns as "sensitive", so CryptDB will never peel the onion back too far. But then you can't use that column for most queries. Like I said, be very careful.