Song Bian, Haowen Pan, Jiaqi Hu, Zhou Zhang, and Yunhao Fu, Beihang University; Jiafeng Hua, Huawei Technology; Yi Chen and Bo Zhang, Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing; Yier Jin, University of Science and Technology of China; Jin Dong, Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing; Zhenyu Guan, Beihang University
This work proposes an encrypted hybrid database framework that combines vectorized data search and relational data query over quantized fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). We observe that, due to the lack of efficient encrypted data ordering capabilities, most existing encrypted database (EDB) frameworks do not support hybrid queries involving both vectorized and relational data. To further enrich query expressiveness while retaining evaluation efficiency, we propose Engorgio, a hybrid EDB framework based on quantized data ordering techniques over FHE. Specifically, we design a new quantized data encoding scheme along with a set of novel comparison and permutation algorithms to accurately generate and apply orders between large-precision data items. Furthermore, we optimize specific query types, including full table scan, batched query, and Top-k query to enhance the practical performance of the proposed framework. In the experiment, we show that, compared to the state-of-the-art EDB frameworks, Engorgio is up to 28x–854x faster in homomorphic comparison, 65x–687x faster in homomorphic sorting and 15x–1,640x faster over a variety of end-to-end relational, vectorized, and hybrid SQL benchmarks. Using Engorgio, the amortized runtime for executing a relational and hybrid query on a 48-core processor is under 3 and 75 seconds, respectively, over a 10K-row hybrid database.
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author = {Song Bian and Haowen Pan and Jiaqi Hu and Zhou Zhang and Yunhao Fu and Jiafeng Hua and Yunyi Chen and Bo Zhang and Yier Jin and Jin Dong and Zhenyu Guan},
title = {Engorgio: An {Arbitrary-Precision} {Unbounded-Size} Hybrid Encrypted Database via Quantized Fully Homomorphic Encryption},
booktitle = {34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 25)},
year = {2025},
isbn = {978-1-939133-52-6},
address = {Seattle, WA},
pages = {8441--8460},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/presentation/bian},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}


