An MIT Magic Trick: Computing On Encrypted Databases Without Ever Decrypting Them – Forbes.

Now the Google- and Citigroup-funded work of three MIT scientists holds the promise of solving that long-nagging issue in some of the computing world’s most common applications. CryptDB, a piece of database software the researchers presented in a paper (PDF here) at the Symposium on Operating System Principles in October, allows users to send queries to an encrypted set of data and get almost any answer they need from it without ever decrypting the stored information, a trick that keeps the info safe from hackers, accidental loss and even snooping administrators. And while it’s not the first system to offer that kind of magically flexible cryptography, it may be the first practical one, taking a fraction of a second to produce an answer where other systems that perform the same encrypted functions would require thousands of years.