RE: Column encryption use-case

From: Mark W. Farnham <mwf_at_rsiz.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2023 12:25:37 -0400
Message-ID: <0df701d9ea4c$c29fffe0$47dfffa0$_at_rsiz.com>



First, this is significantly MORE than just the column.  

Yes, if, for example, the account_number appears in a string that can be parsed, then it needs to be masked in all such strings if that is sensitive information in the context of your access rules.  

As for the feasibility of joins, if you use the same encryption in each such instance that magically works out for itself for joins and equality but beggars the imagination for ranges. (Actually you could imagine a lookup table that translates encryption back to a value that you can range, but it is very complicated to both make it work and NOT weaken the encryption.)  

Your goal is also important. If you just don’t want folks to casually see an account_number browsing the data that is less severe than actually making it take considerable computer time to decrypt such values.  

VPD has been mentioned on the thread. That might accomplish your goal. But probably you need to hire an expert in this, whose first task should probably be to pin down very carefully the goals and tolerable side effects of the encryption.  

Good luck,  

mwf  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Lok P Sent: Friday, September 15, 2023 10:00 PM To: Oracle L
Subject: Column encryption use-case  

Hello Friends, It's Oracle version 19C.  

We are using tablespace TDE for "data at rest" encryption. We have got a security requirement , as part of which TDE is not sufficient as , although it's encrypted in storage , the data is visible to clear text to all whoever selects from that table. The sensitive column(e.g. account_number) should not be visible to others in clear text and should be stored as encrypted only. And should also be decrypted as and when required by the application logic from the app account but not from the individual user account. And currently the application is required to query/fetch/join that column as and when required and we have indexes that exist on the column in few cases. Also there are cases, the column/attribute which we want to encrypt is part of a clob column which stores Json format strings. Would it be okay to encrypt a full clob or should we extract the sensitive column out from the clob and store it as a different column and then encrypt that?  

While searching over the internet , I found dbms_crypto. But I have never used it in the past. So I wanted to know from experts here , if this above use case should be catered by the dbms_crypto package and then how the key management happens here? or any other possible easy/more performant methods are available in latest Oracle versions? Because having indexes created on the encrypted column may have performance overhead while decrypting , so I want to be cautious.  

 And this activity we need to do on the existing data and the newly coming data to the table. There are 100's of million rows inserted/queried per day to/from the table along with that column.  

Appreciate your guidance.  

Regards

Lok

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Received on Mon Sep 18 2023 - 18:25:37 CEST

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