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

On 3/4/19 6:55 PM, Laurenz Albe wrote:
> Masahiko Sawada wrote:
>> Why do people want to just encrypt everything? For satisfying some
>> security compliance?
>
> I'd say that TDE primarily protects you from masked ninjas that
> break into your server room and rip out the disks with your database
> on them.
>
> Or from people stealing your file system backups that you leave
> lying around in public.
>
> My guess is that this requirement almost always comes from security
> departments that don't know a lot about the typical security threats
> that databases face, or (worse) from lawmakers.
>
> And these are probably the people who will insist that *everything*
> is encrypted, even your commit log (unencrypted log? everyone can
> read the commits?).
>

IMHO it's a sound design principle - deny access by default, then allow
for specific cases. It's much easier to reason about, and also validate
such solutions.

It's pretty much the same reason why firewall rules generally prohibit
everything by default, and then only allow access for specific ports,
from specific IP ranges, etc. Doing it the other way around is futile.

regards

--
Tomas Vondra http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
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