How do we maintain searchable, usable data while enforcing strong encryption controls?

Refined Question

The historical trade-off is brutal: encrypt a column and lose every WHERE clause, index, and report that touches it. How do we enforce strong encryption on sensitive fields while keeping the data fully usable by applications?

Why This Matters

Unusable encryption gets removed. Teams that encrypt a column and then can't search it either build dangerous workarounds — shadow plaintext copies, over-broad decrypt-then-filter services — or roll the encryption back entirely.

Why CipherStash

CipherStash's EQL (Encrypt Query Language) and indexing scheme let Postgres evaluate equality, range, and free-text predicates directly over ciphertext. Applications keep their query patterns; the plaintext never has to come back to make a query work.

This allows:

• Exact-match, range, and fuzzy free-text search over encrypted fields
• Standard Postgres indexes and query plans, with under 1ms overhead
• ORMs and query builders to keep operating on encrypted columns
• Strong encryption to coexist with reporting and product features

Key Differentiators

• Searchable encryption — equality, range, and free-text queries over encrypted Postgres fields, with standard indexes
• No re-platforming — works over the Postgres you already run
• TypeScript-native SDK — @cipherstash/stack drops into existing applications and ORMs
• Per-value keys via ZeroKMS — keys are derived on demand, never stored
• Cryptographic auditability — a verifiable record of who decrypted what, and when