Re: Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and encrypted files

Greetings,

* Magnus Hagander (magnus(at)hagander(dot)net) wrote:
> Unless we are *absolutely* certain, I bet someone will be able to find a
> side-channel that somehow leaks some data or data-about-data, if we don't
> encrypt everything. If nothing else, you can get use patterns out of it,
> and you can make a lot from that. (E.g. by whether transactions are using
> multixacts or not you can potentially determine which transaction they are,
> if you know what type of transactions are being issued by the application.
> In the simplest case, there might be a single pattern where multixacts end
> up actually being used, and in that case being able to see the multixact
> data tells you a lot about the system).

Thanks for bringing up the concern but this still doesn't strike me, at
least, as being a huge gaping hole that people will have large issues
with. In other words, I don't agree that this is a high bandwidth side
channel and I don't think that it, alone, brings up a strong need to
encrypt clog and multixact.

> As for other things -- by default, we store the log files in text format in
> the data directory. That contains *loads* of sensitive data in a lot of
> cases. Will those also be encrypted?

imv, this is a largely independent thing, as I said elsewhere, and has
its own set of challenges and considerations to deal with.

Thanks,

Stephen