Why encrypt database

The HSM never hands out the keys, making copying and therefore proliferation of keys impossible. Turning paper-based security policies into steel, organizations find it easier to prove to auditors that security procedures are being followed. Key management is increasingly being reviewed by auditors, and regulation is beginning to mandate some sort of key management systems. Authenticate your administrators and ensure separation of duties Even a physically secure key management system will be undermined by weak administrator access controls.

This is a particularly important consideration given the current economic environment and the recent rise in insider fraud. BDO Stoy Hayward found that employee fraud comprised 11 per cent of all fraud committed in compared with just 2. The value of strong authentication techniques for administrators is obvious.

Security against insider fraud can be bolstered by the concept of separation of duties, for example by ensuring that the administrators controlling access to encrypted data are different from those governing access to the keys.

Going one step further still, the best key management systems require multiple security administrators to collaborate, each requiring the others to authorize an operation. Such controls are fairly simple to manage and, crucially for regulatory purposes, measurable and easily audited. Automate your key management tasks Most key management tasks are based on set procedures and execution becomes a costly challenge as the number of keys increases. In such cases, automation is essential and good key management systems can facilitate this.

However, in emergency situations or when servicing urgent requests to access data, such as for forensic investigations, key management tasks are often time-sensitive. In such situations, the data recovery process often requires locating encryption keys quickly for backups created weeks, months or several years earlier.

A comprehensive key management strategy is essential to ensure that keys are easily located and prevent the situation getting out of hand, particularly when large quantities of historic keys accumulate. Keep track of your key management activities The value of keeping track of key management activities and establishing an audit trail is clear and a good example of this is key destruction. When storage media containing sensitive data, such as a disk drive, is decommissioned or malfunctions, or after data retention periods have ended, organizations are faced with the challenge of destroying this data.

They must also be able to prove that they are no longer a potential source of data loss. Encryption provides a convenient, cheaper and greener means to achieve the same goal, since destroying the key is effectively destroying the data. It is essential that companies can demonstrate that every copy of the key that was ever made, for example for back-up purposes, has been destroyed and they must be able to prove it.

This is only possible if a strong audit record is available and, once again, this comes down to good key management. Whilst much of the onus for implementing good key management lies with security professionals within organizations, there are several initiatives underway designed to simplify the process.

Key management standards are nearing ratification, deployment best practices are well understood within the auditing community and second-generation key management products are reaching the market. Measures such as these will help enable organizations to implement cohesive key management strategies.

How can hardware help? Hardware can manage keys across many application servers It is well-recognized that key use should be restricted and that key backup is extremely important. However, with many silos of encryption and clusters of database application servers, security officers and administrators require a centralized method to define key policy and enforce key management.

Yet, just a relatively small number of HSMs hardware security modules in the same infrastructure can manage keys across a large spectrum of application servers, physical servers and clusters. Such a centralized strategy reduces total operational costs due to the simplification of key management.

With data retention policies in some industries requiring storage for seven years or more, retaining encrypted data means that organizations need to be certain that they are also managing the storage of the key that encrypted that data. Hardware offers the best protection Hardware provides the best protection for encryption keys, as the application never handles the key directly, the encryption key never leaves the device and the key cannot be compromised on the host system.

As a result, unauthorized employees or data thieves cannot access the key material or the cryptographic functions and operations that use keys. Therefore, it becomes the original value by repeating the operation.

In other words,. While a simple concept, there are standards for key specifications, such as the length of the encryption key and the number of times the key can be reused. Current standards are only considered safe until the introduction of completely new computing methods such as quantum computation. Therefore proper encryption key management requires a good understanding of various key types and their properties, to securely store, protect and retrieve keys with different specifications.

Passwords used for identification use the One-way Encryption algorithm. For example, before saving a password, the password is encrypted. The one-way encryption cannot be reversed to convert a cryptogram into plaintext. Passwords encrypted by hashing are not decrypted for verification. Instead, the same hash is performed on a password input and compared against the hashed password stored in the system to verify an ID. This way, the sensitive password need not be stored in plaintext form. For this method, the encryption and decryption keys are the same.

Sometimes referred to as private key encryption, both sender and recipient must have the same symmetric key to receive proper and secure communication. A cryptogram is computed by transforming the plaintext using the binary encryption key value. The recipient of the cryptogram then utilizes the identical encryption key value in the reverse cryptographic algorithm to decrypt the cryptogram. Therefore, the sender and the recipient must securely share knowledge of an identical encryption key.

When a person sends an encrypted message to another person, the recipient should also receive the key. Asymmetric, or public key, encryption is different from symmetric key encryption because it uses two different keys: a private key and a public key. It encrypts with a public key and decrypts with a private key. Just as its name implies, a public key is an open key, and anyone can encrypt the plaintext.

However, only the person who has a private key can decrypt the ciphertext. According to different encryption needs, methods and formats are selected. The encryption process is then designed, and the system is implemented. Simply implementing public keys into an existing private key system does not upgrade it into a public key system. These two key methods are distinct, and a decision between the two has to be made based on need.

While the study of encryption is about trying to explain encryption logic systematically through generalizations and propositions, encryption technology is, based on encryption theories, a product of necessity aimed at creating the most cost-efficient, profitable outcomes in line with economic principles. It is the outcome of a process of transforming, refining, and amalgamating theories for practical application. According to business requirements, the location for encryption implementation and the characteristics of data can differ.

This is why encryption technology needs to be qualified by its business value. Delving into encryption technology, therefore, requires a broad, overall understanding of systems and businesses.

This is a recent example of a mobile messenger application encryption system that was designed and implemented. At the most basic level, data encryption was needed in the DBMS Database Management System , which saves conversations communicated through a messenger. However, in light of general trends in security breaches, the above configuration is incapable of providing sufficient security. In reality, web application encryption needed to be implemented as follows:. The configuration includes the encryption of user authentication, section encryption, message encryption, file encryption and key management.

All kinds of security system configurations follow secure IT system design principles. Therefore, to perfectly deploy encryption technology, all layers and areas of a system needed to be considered. Encryption should be appropriately implemented in all three layers of the IT system, namely the application, system, and network layers. With secure key management, privilege management, and access control, solid encryption is achievable. Even for companies that do implement encryption, they believe that a performance downgrade is simply a necessary trade-off — a price that must be paid in order for their data to be secure.

However, encryption specialists should be able to help implement a system that provides security at the same level for various environments and minimize degradation of system performance. The only way to prevent such incidents is to improve security consciousness across the user group. Until people gain a sufficient understanding of security and receive training in security governance, can proper security administration take place.

But this is undoubtedly the wrong attitude: a specialized encryption vendor will always the first talk about the need for security governance and improving the security consciousness across an organization. Akin to culture, encryption impacts all aspects of a business, including design, development, and operations. Alongside the advancement of the knowledge and information society, data protection is growing in importance. Among various measures for protecting data, from the technical reliability standpoint, the most important and fundamental method is through encryption.

Database encryption methods can be differentiated based on their encryption targets. In file-level encryption , individual database files are encrypted as a whole to restrict unauthorized access. However, partial encryption of the database can be performed with more specific targets as follows:.

Cell-level encryption : Individual cells are encrypted separately, with their own unique keys. Column-level encryption : Individual columns of data are encrypted separately, with each column having the same key for accessing, reading, and writing data within the column.

Row-level encryption : Individual rows of data are encrypted separately, with their own unique keys for their cells. Table space-level encryption : Individual tablespaces are encrypted as a whole. Each tablespace has a unique key for all of its contents.

Whilst theft of that medical data without the means to identify the patients will be extremely embarrassing, it is unlikely to be anything beyond that. There are literally online competitions that use this anonymised medical data. With the separation of the medical data from the patient's personal details. Use a robust set of roles to limit staff to only what they need. Receptionists only need Patient's personal details, lab staff only need the medical record and PatientID, surgical nurses only currently medical condition and first name.

When you've identified each set of roles, aim to not only implement them in your web application, but also in the database as well as an extra layer of security. Basic encryption for stored data "data at rest" is a Generally Accepted Security Principle, and is probably mandated by law if your country has laws that protect personal or health information.

We're using SQL Server , so we use Microsoft's TDE; there may be some third-party solution for MySQL or perhaps just a general volume encryption approach such as TrueCrypt would work although I'd want to have something that has been certified for use with a database.

By the way, the link you mentioned regarding the separation of sensitive information is something that you should consider on top of the basic database encryption.

EDIT: The encryption mentioned above would encrypt the volume. If someone were to steal the hard drive, they'd find the data encrypted. However, if someone were to run queries on the database, they'd see the unencrypted data that's why I mentioned the separation of information, even though the OP didn't want to discuss this. Note that this recommendation is meant as the minimum that you should do. If you want legal advice, then of course you'll need to look elsewhere.

If you want a more thorough discussion of writing secure code, I would starting with the book Writing Secure Code. Before deciding on such security matters, you should assess the threat model. Without an idea what you're defending against, any measures you take are likely to be of little value. For the first scenario, storing the database and all backups on encrypted volumes should work, provided the server is headless - stealing the server or the tapes would then require breaking the disk-level encryption.

For the second scenario, encrypting database data does help, but only if you don't store the required keys or passphrases anywhere.

In the third scenario, everything depends on the context in which the attack happens: if it is, for example, an XSS or CSRF attack, then an attacker can do anything the legitimate user can, and encrypting your data doesn't help at all.

You threat model, thus, is an attacker who gains read access to the raw database, either by finding the login credentials and managing to log into the database server from outside, or by gaining root access to the database server. A typical path is to first gain shell access on the web server; from there, an attacker can then read the access credentials from the configuration file and connect to the database. An additional consideration is where you keep the keys and passphrases, especially if you're using a platform with a stateless execution model such as PHP.

Ideally, you have the customer type their passphrase when required, and keep it only in memory, or even better, do the decryption client-side but this is not often feasible. On a stateless platform, state is usually carried along using sessions, memcache, databases, or flat files; but all these are far more vulnerable than keeping state in a stateful web application's own memory.

Avoiding this is a chicken-and-egg problem, because if you encrypt the state before persisting it, you just created another secret that you have to remember safely. Remembering the passphrase on the client and sending it along with each request that needs it may be the least horrible solution then; the client is still vulnerable if you have any XSS leaks, and you need to take the usual precautions serve only https, set all cookies to httponly and secure, etc.

No, you probably should not encrypt the data. If you do, you will not be able to easily search it. How would you graph a patient's blood pressure over time if you cant select You should, obviously, make sure the server is properly secured, the network connection is secured, and that the user interface is properly secured including session timeouts so users cant walk away leaving access to anyone who uses their computer.

You also may want to encrypt database backups. And physically secure the room the server is located in. But I would not encrypt the live data. Clarification: This is assuming what the OP was asking about is actually encrypting the data in the database. Not the file system the database resides on. Making the process transparent to the Controllers and Views. Ignoring issues about indexing and other technical database issues when doing this.

It should be possible to have this as a configurable option. Additionally, I would turn encryption on at either a later time or only on the production server. Encrypted data is difficult to debug and work with while developing, and can only be done on certain columns. From the password, you can derive an encryption key which you only store for the session.

That way, it isn't stored anywhere and nobody including DBAs can know it since nobody can know the password either. Anyone attempting to view the DB directly will be looking at gibberish.

The only way to corrupt this is via session hijacking but I'm assuming here that sessions are secure as well. I ask myself why does the client ask you to encrypt the DB?