Can we perform wildcard search on encrypted columns in MySQL and Java

Question

I'm working on a web application where customers' sensitive data like name, dob, etc need to encrypt and store in the database.

For this, I'm using crypto encryption in java to encrypt the given text and storing the encrypted value in the database.

The following is the piece of code to encrypt the text

import java.security.Key;
import javax.crypto.Cipher;
import javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec;
import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Hex;

String key = "";// key to encrypt/decrypt    
String customerName = "customer name";

Key aesKey = generateMySQLAESKey(key,"UTF-8");
Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES");
cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, aesKey);
byte[] encrypted = cipher.doFinal(customerName.getBytes("UTF-8"));
String encrtedName = new String(Hex.encodeHex(encrypted));
// storing this encrtedName as varchar in database

An exact search is done by passing with encrypted value in where clause while querying the data from the database

But how can we perform a wildcard search on encrypted columns?

I'm new to cryptography and encryption methods. Please let me know the best approach for this in Java or Mysql Database

Answer 1

This is more a remark than an answer but as a new member, I can only post answers.

Doing computations on encrypted data is linked to what is called "homomorphic encryption". This is a research topic but currently being implemented in the industry. I found this paper which seems to deal with your problem in a secure way: https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/931.pdf