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Is a slack alternative that can never support search truly a slack alternative?

• icebraining 11y ago
  "Practical techniques for searches on encrypted data" (2000) http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf Highly-Scalable Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Support for Boolean Queries (2013) http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/169 http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/169
  • TorKlingberg 11y ago
    Homomorphic encryption would be great, is it likely to become practically usable soon? That is, is it safe enough against attackers, while allowing useful search?
    • icebraining 11y ago
      Homomorphic encryption is about doing computation on encrypted data, but you don't need it just to search. All you need is some way to get the server to send you the encrypted blocks which contain the messages you want (and which you can decrypt); you don't need the server doing computation on the encrypted data itself. A simple solution: divide the data into N blocks. Create an index that maps words to blocks (e.g. word "hello" is on blocks 36, 43, 84). Then encrypt the blocks and the index and upload them to the server. When you want to search, you just download the index, decrypt it, then use it to identify the blocks you need to download from the server. The first paper I linked has some more advanced techniques of the same sort.
  • llimllib 11y ago
    I admit that I get a bit blurry-eyed reading those, but I hope that they do in fact prove practical and gain implementation usable to everyday programmers.