  Outsourcing a relational database to the cloud offers several benefits,
including scalability, availability, and cost-effectiveness. However, there are
concerns about the confidentiality and security of the outsourced data. A
general approach here would be to encrypt the data with a standardized
encryption algorithm and then store the data only encrypted in the cloud. The
problem with this approach, however, is that with encryption, important
properties of the data such as sorting, format or comparability, which are
essential for the functioning of database queries, are lost. One solution to
this problem is the use of (e.g. order-preserving) encryption algorithms, which
also preserve these properties in the encrypted data, thus enabling queries to
encrypted data. These algorithms range from simple algorithms like Caesar
encryption to secure algorithms like mOPE. In order to be able to use these
algorithms as easy as possible, ``DiCE'' a JDBC driver was developed, that
parses SQL queries as a proxy and transparently encrypts and decrypts these
queries. This allows to execute many queries on an encrypted database in the
cloud with (nearly) the performance as on unencrypted databases. The DiCE
driver can be used with any other JDBC driver and therefore supports a variety
of databases. The driver can be configured to support different encryption
algorithms. To keep track of the operations, the ``Dice Information Client''
has been developed to track the encryption and decryption of the driver.
Although the result of the performance analysis shows a certain overhead due to
the parsing and encryption of the SQL queries in the Dice driver, this overhead
is significantly reduced by other influencing factors such as the network and
parallel queries.

Cryptography and Security;Databases