[Meta] Encryption at rest, how?

[danblah]

How could we do this in the core app? What recommendations do we have for implementations?

[danblah]

Bumping this.

[frjo]

I would have liked to use a transparent full db encryption but that feature is not implemented yet, do work are being done. See. https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Transparent_Data_Encryption

The standard method seems to be to use PgCrypto and encrypt specific fields. The key would be stored as an environment variable in Heroku.

The fields I believe OTF and Reset are mainly interested in are form_date field in tables like funds_applicationform and review_review. i.e. user submitted data.

@danblah Is that assumption correct, about the form_date field (user submitted data)? Anything else you really would like to have encrypted at rest.

@Parbhat Do you have experience using PgCrypto or another more suitable method? How hard/time consuming is it to implement?

[frjo]

https://github.com/dcwatson/django-pgcrypto

[Parbhat]

@frjo I have not used pgCrypto before. django-pgcrypto package seems good but does not support JsonField which is used for form_data. So, the actual blockers will have to see during implementation.

[frjo]

See #2192

[frjo]

There is at least 6 fields that needs to be encrypted, likely more. Most of them are json fields.

I think this application really needs full db transparent encryption but that seems to be some time until postgres implement that. See https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Transparent_Data_Encryption.

Amazon has there own implementation running ut then we are tied to AWS. I would really like to avoid that.