Re: "WIP: Data at rest encryption" patch and, PostgreSQL 11-beta3

On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 5:10 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> ISTM that this is only a problem if you choose the wrong encryption
> method.  One not-wrong encryption method is to use a stream cipher
> --- maybe that's not the exact right technical term, but anyway
> I'm talking about a method which notionally XOR's the cleartext
> data with a random bit stream generated from the encryption key
> (probably along with other knowable inputs such as the block number).
> In such a method, corruption of individual on-disk bytes doesn't
> prevent you from getting the correct decryption of on-disk bytes
> that aren't corrupted.

Oh, that seems like it might be a really good idea.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company