Cryptography Research Group
Research in cryptography at the intersection of databases, security, and privacy.
Who We Are
The MongoDB Cryptography Research Group conducts research in cryptography and works with MongoDB engineering and product teams to transfer and deploy the latest advances in cryptography and privacy.
Research Areas
Encrypted search
Encrypted search algorithms (ESAs) enable efficient searching on encrypted data and are used in technologies like Queryable Encryption. Practical ESAs balance performance and information leakage, making leakage analysis and suppression essential for assessing security guarantees.
Secure multi-party computation
Secure multi-party computation enables multiple parties to collaboratively compute a function on their respective inputs while keeping the inputs private and revealing only the function’s output. A commonly studied example is computing the set intersection or set union of privately held datasets.
Encrypted distributed systems
Encrypted distributed and concurrent algorithms enable the design of distributed systems with cryptographic security guarantees. This area specifically examines the interplay between key distributed system concepts, such as concurrency and consistency, and their impact on security guarantees.
Our Team
Research Papers
MAPLE: MArkov Process Leakage attacks on Encrypted Search
Seny Kamara, Abdelkarim Kati, Tarik Moataz, Jamie DeMaria, Andrew Park, and Amos Treiber, Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, 2024This work studies query equality leakage on dependent queries and presents two new attacks that can work either as known-distribution or known-sample attacks.
Synq: Public Policy Analytics Over Encrypted Data
Zachary Espiritu, Marilyn George, Seny Kamara, and Lucy Qin, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2024We design Synq, a system that supports analytics over encrypted data while accounting for the usability considerations of institutions conducting public policy studies.
Injection-Secure Structured and Searchable Symmetric Encryption
Ghous Amjad, Seny Kamara and Tarik Moataz, Asiacrypt, 2023We propose the first injection-secure multi-map encryption scheme and use it as a building block to design the first injection-secure searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) scheme.