| Abstract: As privacy regulations and security concerns increase, database encryption techniques have become essential in modern applications. Multiple approaches exist for querying encrypted data, including Order-Preserving Encryption, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Oblivious RAM, and Trusted Execution
Environments. However, these come with serious security or performance drawbacks, making them impractical for majority of real-world applications. This paper focuses on two widely used encryption strategies: Searchable Encryption and
Structured Encryption. Searchable Encryption enables exact-match searches on
encrypted fields, whereas Structured Encryption encrypts entire structured objects but requires full decryption on retrieval. Both approaches align with Endto-End Encryption principles, ensuring that sensitive data remains encrypted
throughout its lifecycle, with decryption keys held only by the data owner. We
present a comparative study evaluating the impact of Searchable Encryption and
Structured Encryption on query performance, storage overhead, and computational cost in a relational database setting. The results of our experiment provide
insights into the efficiency of encrypted query processing and are aimed to help
developers in selecting the most suitable encryption method for secure data storage.
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