George Washington wrote:
Is it possible to reconstruct a complete source document from the data stored in the index, even if the fields are only indexed but not stored? Because if the answer is "yes" there is no point in encrypting, unless the index itself can be encrypted. Is it feasible to encrypt the index?
As Otis said, no, in general it's not possible to reconstruct the document, but that might not be needed to discover interesting thing about the documents. For example, it's interesting to know if lots of documents contain the word "zimbra" or the words "eliminate" and "competition" -- smile -- near each other. I'm sure you can dream up your own examples.
If your documents need to be encrypted to protect them, then I would say that your index does as well. Although you can't reconstruct the original document you can certainly find out all kinds of interesting things even just by searching for phrases, let alone looking at what terms were indexesd.
As Otis also suggested, your best bet is going to be to use an encrypted file system; both Linux and Windows offer this capability. Of course, and I presume you've already done this for the douments, you're going to have to worry about the safety of the key used to encrypt the file system and all the other associated security issues.
jch (I wouldn't be paranoid if they weren't out to get me) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
