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

On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 08:07:49PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:18:47AM +0200, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 06:04:30PM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > > Greetings,
> > >
> > > * Tomas Vondra (tomas(dot)vondra(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 04:11:21PM -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > > > >On 2019-Jul-10, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > >>Uh, what if a transaction modifies page 0 and page 1 of the same table
> > > > >>--- don't those pages have the same LSN.
> > > > >
> > > > >No, because WAL being a physical change log, each page gets its own
> > > > >WAL record with its own LSN.
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > What if you have wal_log_hints=off? AFAIK that won't change the page LSN.
> > >
> > > Alvaro suggested elsewhere that we require checksums for these, which
> > > would also force wal_log_hints to be on, and therefore the LSN would
> > > change.
> > >
> >
> > Oh, I see - yes, that would solve the hint bits issue. Not sure we want
> > to combine the features like this, though, as it increases the costs of
> > TDE. But maybe it's the best solution.
>
> Uh, why can't we just force log_hint_bits for encrypted tables? Why
> would we need to use checksums as well?

When we were considering CBC mode for heap/index pages, a change of a
hint bit would change all later 16-byte encrypted blocks. Now that we
are using CTR mode, a change of a hint bit will only change a bit on the
stored page.

Someone could compare the old and new pages and see that a bit was
changed. This would make log_hint_bits less of a requirement with CTR
mode, though leaking hit bit changes is probably not ideal. Perhaps
log_hint_bits should be a recommendation and not a requirement.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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