You don't need to answer. It's okay. I'm largely asking because I've been thinking about writing an series of essays on the subject of security and one of the topics I have taken some notes about is searching encrypted data.

If the index isn't secure, it kind of defeats the idea of encryption - someone need only make off with the index and be able to draw some conclusions. More so if it's relational.

There are different ways that some go about this, one is the hash with individual words with a unique salt and search for the hashes, but that has its own set of problems, like the ability to eliminate words like 'the' and 'it' from search queries. Well, at least computationally easy.

So, it's purely for my own curiosity that I ask. I imagine it might be doable to load it into RAM, the whole DB - if it's small enough or you have enough RAM, and then do the searches there in an encrypted environment?

I am not so concerned with exfiltration by 'hackers' so much as I'm concerned with exfiltration by employees. Should I get to writing the essays, that's going to be a central theme - protecting data from rogue employees with the increased use of cloud services in today's business environment.

Again, I'd not want you to feel obligated to release anything proprietary or anything that would compromise your security.