On Apr 16, 2009, at 12:40 PM, Bill Moran wrote: (This is the traditional "you're asking the wrong question" response).
What are folks doing to protect sensitive data in their databases?
I don't think that's a useful way to look at it. Protecting sensitive data in the entire system, where the database is just one part of that system is likely to lead to a much better answer.
We're running on the assumption that the _really_ sensitive data is too sensitive for us to just trust the front-end programs that connect to it. The decision coming down from on-high is that we need to encrypt certain fields.
If that's the mandate, then that's what you have to do. It's unlikely to make the system overall much more secure, and likely no more secure than some much less intrusive approaches, though.
That's fine, looked at pgcrypto, but found the requirement to use pgp on the command line for key management to be a problem. So we're trying to implement the encryption in the front-end, but the problem we're having is searching on the encrypted fields. Since we have to decrypt each field to search on it, queries that previously took seconds now take minutes (or worse). We've tested a number of cryptographic accelerator products. In case nobody else has tried this, let me give away the ending: none that we've found are any faster than a typical server CPU. So, it's a pretty open-ended question, since we're still pretty open to different approaches, but how are others approaching this problem? The goal here is that if we're going to encrypt the data, it should be encrypted in such a way that if an attacker gets ahold of a dump of the database, they still can't access the data without the passphrases of the individuals who entered the data.
If the concern is database dumps, then encrypting the output of pg_dump will pretty much solve the problem. But if the attack vector is the common one of compromising the front end, then encrypting data in the database, but allowing the front end to decrypt it is likely useless. If the concern is "what if an attacker got access to the server?" then physical security is likely to have much better ROI than some random encryption regime. Can you go back and ask your management what their actual security or compliance needs are? If it's a real business need you probably want to find a decent security guy and have him draft the questions that management need to answer and start from there, rather than trying to clean up after someone has already made 95% of the decisions, in an uninformed way, for you. Cheers, Steve -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
