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

Greetings,

* Bruce Momjian (bruce(at)momjian(dot)us) wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 17, 2019 at 01:52:17PM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > Being PostgreSQL, I would expect us to shoot for as much flexibility as
> > we possible, similar to what we've done for our ACL system where we
> > support down to a column-level (and row level with RLS).
> >
> > That's our target end-goal. Having an incremental plan to get there
> > where we start with something simpler and then work towards a more
> > complicated implementation is fine- but that base, as I've said multiple
> > times and as supported by what we see other database systems have,
> > should include some kind of key store with support for multiple keys and
> > a way to encrypt something less than the entire system. Every other
> > database system that we consider at all comparable has at least that.
>
> Well, we don't blindly copy features from other databases. The features
> has to be useful for our users and reasonable to implement in Postgres.
> This is been the criteria for every other Postgres features I have seen
> developed.

Having listed out the feature set of each of the other major databases
when it comes to TDE is exactly how we objectively look at what is being
done in the industry, and that then gives us an understanding of what
users (and auditors) coming from other platforms will expect.

I entirely agree that we shouldn't just copy N feature from X other
database system unless we feel that's the best approach, but when every
other database system out there has capability Y for the general feature
X that we're thinking about implementing, we should be questioning an
approach which doesn't include that.

Thanks,

Stephen