Re: Where do you store key for encryption

Got it.
Thank you very much for your advice.

-----Original Message-----
From: Merlin Moncure [mailto:mmoncure@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 8:54 PM
To: Naoko Reeves
Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Where do you store key for encryption

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:12 PM, Naoko Reeves <naoko@lawlogix.com>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We have web application and encrypt PII columns. We use
encrypt/decrypt
> function for this.
>
> Currently we hard coded the key in postgresql function which I am not
sure
> of it.
>
> I did google it and people suggest that it needed to be stored in
physically
> isolated location (storing decryption key on the same server as the
data is
> kind of like writing your PIN on your ATM card).

Key management is a complicated topic, but I can tell you this for
sure: storing the key in the function is one of the worst places to do
it :-)  Any user can pull down the entire pg_proc table and see all
your functions! (this is somewhat fixable, but It's still not the
right place IMO).

merlin