Confidential Databases Without Cryptographic Mappings

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 19 Mar 2026] Confidential Databases Without Cryptographic Mappings Wenxuan Huang, Zhanbo Wang, Mingyu Li Confidential databases (CDBs) are essential for enabling secure queries over sensitive data in untrusted cloud environments using confidential computing hardware. While adoption is growing, widespread deployment is hindered by high performance overhead from frequent synchronous cryptographic operations, which causes significant computational and memory bottlenecks. We present FEDB, a novel CDB design that removes cryptographic operations from the critical path. FEDB leverages crypto-free mappings, which maintain data-independent identifiers within the database while securely mapping them to plaintext secrets in a trusted domain. This paradigm shift reduces the runtime overhead by up to 78.0 times on industry-standard benchmarks including TPC-C and TPC-H. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Databases (cs.DB) Cite as: arXiv:2603.18836 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.18836v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.18836 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Wenxuan Huang [view email] [v1] Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:37:35 UTC (1,529 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.DB References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)