From: Michel Pelletier <pelletier.mic...@gmail.com>
Sent: 05 July 2020 17:00
To: Zahir Lalani <ZahirLalani@oliver.agency>
Cc: pgsql-gene...@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Application Level Encryption

Hi Zahir,

pgsodium is a new-ish encyption extension built around the libsodium encryption 
API.

https://github.com/michelp/pgsodium

It supports calling a script to load a hidden key in memory and use that key to 
derive other keys.  There's an example shown in the documentation.  I'm working 
on support for the Zymkey hardware security module, as well as support for the 
AWS key management API.

-Michel


Thx all

So what Michael has posted above is actually the target. We are hosted in 
Google Cloud and have been told that we need to use a key manager outside of PG 
(Google have KMS) and that it must have a master key which is rotated 
regularly. We are having a debate about what to encrypt – “it must encrypt our 
data” – we are multi-tenanted and also we have data that is not client facing 
in each tenant. I worry about applying app level to all data for sheer 
performance reasons.

We have suggested we only encrypt what is truly client data so that we do not 
have to refactor everything.

The other challenge we have is the external reporting tools we use – none of 
these will work as, and we cannot pass them the unencrypted data.

So I wanted to understand approaches that could be taken and how to minimise 
performance impacts and how to manage the use of 3rd party tools

Hope that makes sense

Z

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