FINDING · EVALUATION
In PostgreSQL benchmarks, FPE-encrypted account-balance fields (libfte P-DD scheme, regex `\-[0-9]{9}`) reduce throughput by only 0.8% for complex mixed-transaction workloads (USUUI) and only 1.1% for SELECT-only workloads, relative to conventional authenticated encryption. Per-query latency for FPE versus authenticated encryption is identical across all five tested query types.
From 2014-luchaup-libfte — LibFTE: A Toolkit for Constructing Practical, Format-Abiding Encryption Schemes · §7.1, Tables 8–9 · 2014 · USENIX Security Symposium
Implications
- FPE is viable for format-constrained fields in circumvention infrastructure (API responses, database records, configuration payloads) with negligible throughput cost.
- FPE's overhead versus AES-ECB is dominated by the underlying FFX primitive (≥10 AES calls per operation), not the ranking step; minimize cost by choosing the smallest regex that satisfies format requirements.
Tags
Extracted by claude-sonnet-4-6 — review before relying.