Re: Key management with tests

Greetings,

* Bruce Momjian (bruce(at)momjian(dot)us) wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 12:54:49PM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > Although, another approach and one that I've discussed a bit with Bruce,
> > is to have more keys- such as a key for temporary files, and perhaps
> > even a key for logged relations and a different for unlogged.. Or
>
> Yes, we have to make sure the nonce (computed as LSN/pageno) is never
> reused, so if we have several LSN usage "spaces", they need different
> data keys.

Right, or ensure that the actual IV used is distinct (such as by using
another bit in the IV to distinguish logged-vs-unlogged), but it seems
saner to just use a different key, ultimately.

> > perhaps sets of keys for each which automatically are rotating every X
> > number of GB based on the LSN... Which is a big part of why key
> > management is such an important part of this effort.
>
> Yes, this would avoid the need to failover to a standby for data key
> rotation.

Yes, and it avoids the issue of using a single key for too much, which
is also a concern. The remaining larger issues are to figure out a
place to put the tag for each page, and the relatively simple matter of
programming a mechanism to cache the keys we're commonly using (current
key for encryption, recently used keys for decryption) since we'll
eventually get to a point of having written out more data than we are
going to keep keys in memory for.

Thanks,

Stephen