Re: Key management with tests

Greetings,

* Bruce Momjian (bruce@momjian.us) wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 01:23:27PM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > Yes, and it avoids the issue of using a single key for too much, which
> > is also a concern.  The remaining larger issues are to figure out a
> > place to put the tag for each page, and the relatively simple matter of
> > programming a mechanism to cache the keys we're commonly using (current
> > key for encryption, recently used keys for decryption) since we'll
> > eventually get to a point of having written out more data than we are
> > going to keep keys in memory for.
> 
> I thought the LSN range would be stored with the keys, so there is no
> need to tag the LSN on each page.

Yes, LSN range would be stored with the keys in some fashion (maybe just
the start of a particular LSN range would be in the filename of the key
for that range...).  The 'tag' that I'm referring to there is one of the
outputs from the GCM encryption and is what provides the integrity /
authentication of the encrypted data to be able to detect if it's been
modified.  Unfortunately, while the page checksum will continue to be
used and available for checking against disk corruption, it's not
sufficient.  Hence, ideally, we'd find a spot to stick the 128-bit tag
on each page.

Given that, clearly, it's not possible to go from an unencrypted cluster
to an encrypted cluster without rewriting the entire cluster, we aren't
bound to maintain the on-disk page format, we should be able to
accomadate including the tag somewhere.  Unfortuantely, it doesn't seem
quite as trivial as I'd hoped since there are parts of the code which
make assumptions about the page beyond perhaps what they should be, but
I'm still hopeful that it won't be *too* hard to do.

Thanks,

Stephen