[Xapian-discuss] Encrypted Database Files

[Jim Lynch]

I don't know if there is a way to turn off positional information in the 
database or not, however if there isn't then a person could conceivably 
rebuild the message.  If stemming is turned on, the words might be a 
little strange, e. g. no plurals, no -ed or -ing, etc. but the gist of 
the message could be recognizable.  I doubt there is a modern search 
engine that doesn't store positional information. 

As James said earlier, I've never tried it, but I think it is possible. 

It would be a lot of work and it would slow searching and indexing down 
a bunch but you could modify the code to store encoded blocks of data 
since the source is available to you.  In fact, you would only need to 
encode the positional data, not the terms themselves.

Jim.

David Blewett wrote:

> Hi all:
>
> I'm considering using Xapian to index email messages in an IMAP server 
> I'm writing. Is it possible to encrypt the databases stored on disk, 
> so that someone cannot recover their contents?
>
> What I would like to do is when a message is received, send it through 
> Xapian to be indexed. Then encrypt the contents and store it. When I 
> run a search through Xapian, all I need is some sort of ID so I can 
> retrieve the message and decrypt it. I don't want someone to be able 
> to use the Xapian database to reconstruct the messages indexed. Is 
> this possible?  If not, is there another indexing engine that can? 
> Thanks!
>
> David
>
>
>
>
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