How to improve Search in SQL Server table containing Encrypted data?

Question

In my application there are two table with primary Key -Foreign Key relation. There are around 50 million combination. Earlier all data was in plain text Like in Column 1 - ABC , Column 2- XYZ

Scenario is if I am putting these values in textbox and validate it will show that these combinations are valid.

But due to security purpose I encrypted these column values, but now the search time has increased. I am just explaining the concept here.

In real application if I put a file and validate before encryption it took 50 sec to validate, after encryption it is taking more that 3 mins to validate the same file. Any way to achieve the earlier performance in encrypted version?

Answer 1

No, probably not. If you think about it, the values have to be decrypted before they can be validated, and decryption is an expensive operation in terms of CPU cycles. This is probably just the price you need to pay for the increased security of having encryption on those columns.