Cryptanalysis of a Fast Encryption Scheme for Databases

Protecting the confidentiality in large databases without degrading their performance is a challenging problem, especially when encryption and decryption must be performed at the database-level or at the application-level. We here focus on symmetric ciphers for database encryption since they are the only type of ciphers with acceptable performance for most applications. We point out that stream ciphers are the adequate type of encryption schemes. We present an attack on a dedicated stream cipher proposed by Ge and Zdonic in 2007.