Horton

Re: [Proposal] Table-level Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Key Management Service (KMS)

Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>

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From: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
To: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
Cc: Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com>, Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com>, Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com>, Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Antonin Houska <ah@cybertec.at>, Haribabu Kommi <kommi.haribabu@gmail.com>, "Moon, Insung" <Moon_Insung_i3@lab.ntt.co.jp>, Ibrar Ahmed <ibrar.ahmad@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2019-07-09T15:09:01Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →

  1. Revamp the WAL record format.

On Tue, Jul  9, 2019 at 10:59:12AM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * Bruce Momjian (bruce@momjian.us) wrote:
> I agree that all of that isn't necessary for an initial implementation,
> I was rather trying to lay out how we could improve on this in the
> future and why having the keying done at a tablespace level makes sense
> initially because we can then potentially move forward with further
> segregation to improve the situation.  I do believe it's also useful in
> its own right, to be clear, just not as nice since a compromised backend
> could still get access to data in shared buffers that it really
> shouldn't be able to, even broadly, see.

I think TDE is feature of questionable value at best and the idea that
we would fundmentally change the internals of Postgres to add more
features to it seems very unlikely.  I realize we have to discuss it so
we don't block reasonable future feature development.

> > Agreed.  I have thought about this some more.  There is certainly value
> > in layered security, so if something gets violated, it doesn't open the
> > whole system.  However, I think the layering has to be done at the right
> > levels, and I think you want levels that have clear boundaries, like IP
> > filtering or monitoring.  Placing a boundary inside the database seems
> > much too complex a level to be effective.  Using separate encrypted and
> > unencrypted clusters and allowing the encrypted cluster to query the
> > unencrypted clusters using FDWs does seem like good layering, though the
> > FDW queries might leak information.
> 
> Using FDWs simply isn't a solution to this, for a few different reasons-
> the first is that our solution to authentication for FDWs is to store
> passwords in our catalog tables, but an FDW table also doesn't behave
> like a regular table in many important cases.

The FDW authentication problem is something I think we need to improve
no matter what.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

+ As you are, so once was I.  As I am, so you will be. +
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