Preventing Leakages of Business Secrets from Encrypt Data Stored in the Cloud

For all sound reasons, more and more organizations are deploying their databases to the cloud as a viable option as part of their nowadays system architecture. Since we cannot be sure that our database access would never be compromised, data encryptions of various forms and levels have become the utmost techniques used to prevent malicious parties, internal or external, from inspecting an organization´s data, in transit or at rest. However, in this short paper we will show that, despite the fact that encryptions can be very effective in hiding information contained in individual records, they may be rendered ineffective in protecting business secrets embedded in aggregated date, such as the number of customers. We will also propose simple and effective counter measures to prevent leakages of such business secrets.