Accelerating Confidential Databases with Crypto-Free Mappings
Talkat 20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '26) · 2026-07-13..07-15·
summary
ZENO replaces per-field encryption with crypto-free mappings that store compact integer FIDs and a trusted mapping store inside the TEE, performing map lookups (~30 cycles) instead of millions of decryptions. It merges mapping logs with DB WAL so commits use a merged WAL single write, keeping one-way crash consistency. On TPC-H/TPC-C and an industrial workload ZENO speeds up queries by up to 53.1× on ARM S-EL2 and 94.7× on x86 TDX versus HEDB, cuts storage overheads, and its techniques ship in GaussDB.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Confidential databases intro
- 2:48Modern confidential DBs
- 6:23Zeno's FID mappings
- 8:10Scaling mapping store
- 9:34Access locality on disk
- 11:45Transactional consistency
- 15:19Evaluation vs state-of-the-art
- 16:30Conclusion and open-source
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