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Cryptography Research Group

Research in cryptography at the intersection of databases, security, and privacy.
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Who We Are
The MongoDB Cryptography Research Group conducts research in cryptography and works with MongoDB engineering and product teams to transfer and deploy the latest advances in cryptography and privacy.
Research Areas
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Encrypted search

Encrypted search algorithms (ESAs) enable efficient searching on encrypted data and are used in technologies like Queryable Encryption. Practical ESAs balance performance and information leakage, making leakage analysis and suppression essential for assessing security guarantees.

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Secure multi-party computation

Secure multi-party computation enables multiple parties to collaboratively compute a function on their respective inputs while keeping the inputs private and revealing only the function’s output. A commonly studied example is computing the set intersection or set union of privately held datasets.

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Encrypted distributed systems

Encrypted distributed and concurrent algorithms enable the design of distributed systems with cryptographic security guarantees. This area specifically examines the interplay between key distributed system concepts, such as concurrency and consistency, and their impact on security guarantees.

Our Team
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Archita Agarwal

Senior Research Scientist

Archita’s research bridges the gap between encrypted search and distributed computing.

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Zachary Espiritu

Senior Research Engineer

Zachary’s research focuses on both cryptographic design and cryptanalysis of encrypted search algorithms.

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Marilyn George

Senior Research Scientist

Marilyn’s research focuses on understanding the efficiency and security trade-offs of the real-world use of cryptography.

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Seny Kamara

Distinguished Research Scientist and Head of Research

Seny has worked extensively on the design and cryptanalysis of encrypted search algorithms.

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Tarik Moataz

Principal Research Scientist

Tarik’s research interests are in the area of cryptography and computer security with a focus on encrypted search.

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Andrew Park

Senior Research Engineer

Andrew’s research focuses on practical design of cryptographic protocols.

Research Papers

Bayesian Leakage Analysis: A Framework for Analyzing Leakage in Encrypted Search

Zachary Espiritu, Seny Kamara, and Tarik Moataz

IACR Communications in Cryptology, 2025

This work proposes a theoretical framework for analyzing and better understanding leakage.

Concurrent Encrypted Multimaps

Archita Agarwal, Seny Kamara, and Tarik Moataz

Asiacrypt, 2024

This work initiates the study of encrypted data structures in the concurrent setting.

MAPLE: MArkov Process Leakage attacks on Encrypted Search

Seny Kamara, Abdelkarim Kati, Tarik Moataz, Jamie DeMaria, Andrew Park, and Amos Treiber

Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, 2024

This work studies query equality leakage on dependent queries and presents two new attacks that can work either as known-distribution or known-sample attacks.

Synq: Public Policy Analytics Over Encrypted Data

Zachary Espiritu, Marilyn George, Seny Kamara, and Lucy Qin

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2024

We design Synq, a system that supports analytics over encrypted data while accounting for the usability considerations of institutions conducting public policy studies.

Design and Analysis of a Stateless Database Encryption Scheme

Seny Kamara and Tarik Moataz

Technical report, 2023

In this work, we design the first encrypted document database scheme focusing on designing a scheme that is practical with respect to real-world constraints.

An Overview of MongoDB’s Queryable Encryption

Technical report, 2023

An overview of Queryable Encryption, its design goals, threat model, security properties, and performance.

Injection-Secure Structured and Searchable Symmetric Encryption

Ghous Amjad, Seny Kamara and Tarik Moataz

Asiacrypt, 2024

We propose the first injection-secure multi-map encryption scheme and use it as a building block to design the first injection-secure searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) scheme.