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

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 6:57 AM, Nico Williams <nico(at)cryptonector(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 05:16:46PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 12:29:57PM -0500, Nico Williams wrote:
>> > Note that unless the pg_catalog is protected against manipulation by
>> > remote storage, then TDE for user tables might be possible to
>> > compromise. Like so: the attacker manipulates the pg_catalog to
>> > escalate privelege in order to obtain the TDE keys. This argues for
>> > full database encryption, not just specific tables or columns. But
>> > again, this is for the threat model where the storage is the threat.
>>
>> Yes, one big problem with per-column encryption is that administrators
>> can silently delete data, though they can't add or modify it.
>
> They can also re-add ("replay") deleted values; this can only be
> defeated by also binding TX IDs or alike in the ciphertext. And if you
> don't bind the encrypted values to the PKs then they can add any value
> they've seen to different rows.

I think we could avoid it by implementations. If we implement
per-column encryption by putting all encrypted columns out to another
table like TOAST table and encrypting whole that external table then
we can do per-column encryption without such concerns. Also, that way
we can encrypt data when disk I/O even if we use per-column
encryption. It would get a better performance. A downside of this idea
is extra overhead to access encrypted column but it would be
predictable since we have TOAST.

Regards,

--
Masahiko Sawada
NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION
NTT Open Source Software Center