How to search for encrypted value using Laravel Eloquent ORM?

Question

I've got a Laravel codebase which records are encrypted before they are inserted in the Mysql database. The encryption is done using the Crypto methods of the php-encryption library . If I want to find a record based on one of the encrypted values, looping over all the records works:

$records = TheModel::all();
foreach ($records as $record){
    if ($record->thefield == $value) {  // thefield is decrypted in the Eloquent model definition
        print $record->id;
    }
}

Unfortunately this isn't very scalable. The DB is still quite small, but growing quick so I need to change this code to actually do a query.

So I tried the following code:

$encryptedValue = \App\Crypt::encryptData($value);
$records = TheModel::where('thefield', $encryptedValue)->get();
foreach ($records as $record){
    print $record->id;
}

But this doesn't return anything. So I then found this SO question it is suggested to add '0x' , wrap it in BIN2HEX() or HEX() or add an x before it (like x'abcd' ).

I tried adding '0x' (which doesn't work), but I'm not sure how I could incorporate the other ideas in my code.

Does anybody know how I could try out these ideas with my code?

Answer 1

You can't solve the problem with the tools you're using.

Laravel's encryption is randomized (this is a good thing for security, but it makes it impractical for search operations).

Check out CipherSweet , which implements searchable encryption in a way that can be used with any database driver. There isn't currently an Eloquent ORM integration written anywhere, but it should be straightforward to implement.