Field Level Encryption

[labbe5]

https://www.wired.com/story/field-level ... es-mongobd

Data breaches and exposures have become so common these days, it's difficult to keep track of them all, much less step back to mull a solution. But, perhaps out of necessity, researchers from the database giant MongoDB have spent the past two years developing a new database encryption scheme aimed squarely at reducing these damaging incidents.

The idea of encrypting databases in various ways isn't new. But in practice there have been limitations on where and when data was actually protected. Databases are often encrypted "server-side," meaning that random strangers can't just query it for information, but credentialed users can access some or all of the information in it. But that also means that anyone with full access to the data—like the database operator and administrators—can decrypt and access everything. This puts the data at risk to both outside hackers wielding stolen credentials and rogue insiders who have been granted more access than they need.

"One reason that no one did this before was because they didn’t perceive customer demand the way that it’s easy to perceive today," says Davi Ottenheimer, MongoDB's vice president of trust and digital ethics. All those high-profile database breaches have finally started to make companies aware of what solid encryption is worth.

MongoDB calls the new feature Field Level Encryption. It works kind of like end-to-end encrypted messaging, which scrambles data as it moves across the internet, revealing it only to the sender and the recipient. In such a "client-side" encryption scheme, databases utilizing Field Level Encryption will not only require a system login, but will additionally require specific keys to process and decrypt specific chunks of data locally on a user's device as needed. That means MongoDB itself and cloud providers won't be able to access customer data, and a database's administrators or remote managers don't need to have access to everything either.

Further reading :
Google Turns to Retro Cryptography to Keep Data Sets Private
https://www.wired.com/story/google-priv ... ncryption/

[Flash]

This sounds like enterprise-level https.

Encryption is a form of access control. The problem with encrypting anything is, if you lose the password or encryption key, the encrypted data is useless gibberish. By encrypting the data, you add a new problem to your life: password management. In large organizations it is a problem no one has found a good solution for, beyond hoping that someone who works for the company will remember the password. As a result, databases on central servers that have to share the data are almost never encrypted. Lose the password and you lose everything.

[rufwoof]

One time pad encryption is mathematically proven uncrackable (providing random data generation is truly random). But requires a 'key' the same size as the data being encrypted. The security being that only when the key and encrypted data are brought together is the data accessible and doesn't require having to remember a password. Does double up on required storage space, but nowadays that's generally relatively inexpensive. Lose one or the other, and that's comparable to having lost the plain text data.

With other keys, that aren't mathematically proven uncrackable, then some time in the future and the data might be exposed, similar to how encrypted sets in the 1980's/16 bit world are now relatively trivial/quick to crack.