Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2017 07:46:01 -0500
From: Kenneth Marshall <ktm@rice.edu>
To: Aleksander Alekseev <a.alekseev@postgrespro.ru>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com>,
	Ants Aasma <ants.aasma@eesti.ee>,
	Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>,
	PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: WIP: Data at rest encryption
Message-ID: <20170614124601.GM26506@aart.rice.edu>
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On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 12:04:26PM +0300, Aleksander Alekseev wrote:
> Hi Ants,
> 
> On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 09:07:49AM -0400, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > On 6/12/17 17:11, Ants Aasma wrote:
> > > I'm curious if the community thinks this is a feature worth having?
> > > Even considering that security experts would classify this kind of
> > > encryption as a checkbox feature.
> > 
> > File system encryption already exists and is well-tested.  I don't see
> > any big advantages in re-implementing all of this one level up.  You
> > would have to touch every single place in PostgreSQL backend and tool
> > code where a file is being read or written.  Yikes.
> 
> I appreciate your work, but unfortunately I must agree with Peter.
> 
> On Linux you can configure the full disc encryption using LUKS /
> dm-crypt in like 5 minutes [1]. On FreeBSD you can do the same using
> geli [2]. In my personal opinion PostgreSQL is already complicated
> enough. A few companies that hired system administrators that are too
> lazy to read two or three man pages is not a reason to re-implement file
> system encryption (or compression, or mirroring if that matters) in any
> open source RDBMS.
> 

Hi Aleksander,

While I agree that configuring full disk encryption is not technically
difficult, it requires much more privileged access to the system and
basically requires the support of a system administrator. In addition,
if a volume is not available for encryption, PostgreSQL support for
encryption would still allow for its data to be encrypted and as others
have mentioned can be enabled by the DBA alone.

Regards,
Ken


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