Re: [HACKERS] WIP: Data at rest encryption

On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 12:30 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 7:51 PM, Alvaro Herrera
> <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> I thought we called it "incremental development".  From the opposite
>> point of view, would you say we should ban use of passphrase-protected
>> SSL key files because the current user interface for them is bad?
>
> I think that we've got a number of features which exist in the tree
> today only because either (a) our standards were lower at the time
> that those features were committed than they are today or (b) we
> didn't realize how much trouble those features were going to create.
> Just because we don't want to hose the people already using those
> features does not mean that we want more features engineered to that
> same quality level.  Obviously, there's room for debate in any
> particular case about how reasonable it is to expect someone who wants
> to implement A to also improve B, and, well, maybe handling thing as
> we do SSL certificates is good enough for this feature, too.  I find
> myself a bit skeptical about that, though.  It preclude as lot of
> things we might want to do.  You're not going to be able to interface
> with some external key management server that way, nor do encryption
> of only part of the database, nor have multiple keys for different
> parts of the database using that kind of setup.
>
> One could argue that can all be added later, but I think there's a
> question about how much that's going to affect the code structure.
> Surely we don't want to install encryption v1 and then find that, by
> not considering key management, we've made it really hard to get to
> v2, and that it basically can't be done without ripping the whole
> implementation out and replacing it.  Maybe the database needs, at
> some rather low level, a concept of whether the encryption key (or an
> encryption key) is available yet, and maybe you get out of considering
> that by deciding you're just going to prompt very early in startup,
> but now when someone comes along and wants to improve things later,
> and they've got to try to go find all of the code that depends on the
> assumption that the key is always available and fix it.  That could be
> pretty annoying to validate.  I think it's better to give at least
> some consideration to these key management questions from the
> beginning, lest we back ourselves into a corner.  Whether or not the
> SSL-passphrase style implementation is above or below the level we'd
> consider a minimally viable feature, it's surely not where we want to
> end up, and we shouldn't do anything that makes it likely that we'll
> get stuck at precisely that point.
>
> Also, practically, I think that type of solution is going to be
> extremely difficult to use for most people.  It means that the
> database can't be started by the system startup scripts; you'll have
> to log into the PG OS user account and launch the database from there.
> IIUC, that means it won't be able to be controlled by things like
> systemd, that just know about start and stop, but not about ask for a
> password in the middle.  Maybe I'm wrong about that, though.  And
> certainly, there will be some users for whom starting the database
> manually and prompting for a password will be good enough, if not
> ideal.  But for people who want to fetch the encryption key from a key
> management server, which I bet is a lot of people, that's not really
> going to be good enough.  I'm not really sure that rushing a first
> patch that "works" for sufficiently small values of "works" is
> actually going

...to move us forward very much.

>> I have no use for data-at-rest encryption myself, but I wouldn't stop
>> development just because the initial design proposal doesn't include
>> top-notch key management.

I agree with that, but there's a difference between "not top-notch"
and "pretty bad".

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company