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

Greetings,

* Bruce Momjian (bruce@momjian.us) wrote:
> On Tue, Jul  9, 2019 at 11:09:01AM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul  9, 2019 at 10:59:12AM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > > * Bruce Momjian (bruce@momjian.us) wrote:
> > > I agree that all of that isn't necessary for an initial implementation,
> > > I was rather trying to lay out how we could improve on this in the
> > > future and why having the keying done at a tablespace level makes sense
> > > initially because we can then potentially move forward with further
> > > segregation to improve the situation.  I do believe it's also useful in
> > > its own right, to be clear, just not as nice since a compromised backend
> > > could still get access to data in shared buffers that it really
> > > shouldn't be able to, even broadly, see.
> >
> > I think TDE is feature of questionable value at best and the idea that
> > we would fundmentally change the internals of Postgres to add more
> > features to it seems very unlikely.  I realize we have to discuss it so
> > we don't block reasonable future feature development.
>
> I have a new crazy idea.  I know we concluded that allowing multiple
> independent keys, e.g., per user, per table, didn't make sense since
> they have to be unlocked all the time, e.g., for crash recovery and
> vacuum freeze.

I'm a bit confused as I never agreed that made any sense and I continue
to feel that it doesn't make sense to have one key for everything.

Crash recovery doesn't happen "all the time" and neither does vacuum
freeze, and autovacuum processes are independent of individual client
backends- we don't need to (and shouldn't) have the keys in shared
memory.

> However, that assumes that all heap/index pages are encrypted, and all
> of WAL.  What if we encrypted only the user-data part of the page, i.e.,
> tuple data.  We left xmin/xmax unencrypted, and only stored the
> encrypted part of that data in WAL, and didn't encrypt any more of WAL.

This is pretty much what Alvaro was suggesting a while ago, isn't it..?
Have just the user data be encrypted in the table and in the WAL stream.

> That might allow crash recovery and the freeze part of VACUUM FREEZE to
> work.  (I don't think we could vacuum since we couldn't read the index
> pages to find the matching rows since the index values would be encrypted
> too.  We might be able to not encrypt the tid in the index typle.)

Why do we need the indexed values to vacuum the index..?  We don't
today, as I recall.  We would need the tids though, yes.

> Is this something considering in version one of this feature?  Probably
> not, but later?  Never?  Would the information leakage be too great,
> particularly from indexes?

What would be leaking from the indexes..?  That an encrypted blob in the
index pointed to a given tid?  Wouldn't someone be able to see that same
information by looking directly at the relation too?

Thanks,

Stephen