by Archita Agarwal As people worldwide continue to generate massive amounts of data, distributed storage systems or distributed databases have become a necessity. Much of this data is sensitive, and it’s been the subject of breaches (Facebook in 2019, Marriott in 2018) that have affected hundreds of millions of users. Encryption is often proposed as a security solution, but when misapplied, it can lead to systems that fail to provide satisfactory privacy guarantees.