The problem of designing end-to-end encrypted systems, and databases in particular, has driven the cryptography research community to study the problem of “searching on encrypted data” for about two decades. This sub-area of cryptography, known as Encrypted Search, has grown tremendously and several approaches have been proposed to encrypt databases, outsource them, and perform encrypted queries on them.

In this talk, we are going to discuss the need for end-to-encryption and how we were able to design a client-side API that makes Elasticsearch end-to-end encrypted. We will discuss the current design, features, and present a demo on how it works.