According to the Azure Cosmos DB documentation1, Always Encrypted is a feature designed to

protect sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or national identification numbers, stored in

Azure Cosmos DB. Always Encrypted allows clients to encrypt sensitive data inside client applications

and never reveal the encryption keys to the database.

To use Always Encrypted, you need to define an encryption policy for each container that specifies

which properties should be encrypted and which data encryption keys (DEK) should be used. The

DEKs are stored in Azure Cosmos DB and are wrapped by customer-managed keys (CMK) that are

stored in Azure Key Vault.

Based on the encryption policy shown in the exhibits, the creditcard property is encrypted with a DEK

named dek1, and the SSN property is encrypted with a DEK named dek2. Both DEKs are wrapped by

a CMK named cmk1.

To answer your statements:

You can perform a query that filters on the creditcard property = No. This is because the creditcard

property is encrypted and cannot be used for filtering or sorting operations1.

You can perform a query that filters on the SSN property = No. This is also because the SSN property

is encrypted and cannot be used for filtering or sorting operations1.

An application can be allowed to read the creditcard property while being restricted from reading the

SSN property = Yes. This is possible by using different CMKs to wrap different DEKs and applying

access policies on the CMKs in Azure Key Vault. For example, if you use cmk2 to wrap dek2 instead of

cmk1, you can grant an application access to cmk1 but not cmk2, which means it can read the

creditcard property but not the SSN property2.