Any system which presents plaintext is vulnerable; it is simply a matter
of complexity. Once you've compromised a layer which processes
plaintext, all layers below it are essentially moot, as the Playstation
network recently discovered.
The only scheme which will defend against data compromise is one in
which the application does not contain sufficient information to
reconstruct the plaintext. For example, you can have the client of the
system (each user, for example) store a secret (say, a password) which
is never yielded directly to the application, but is used as a part of
the cryptosystem key. Hence the application can never reconstruct the
plaintext. This may, of course, limit how useful your application can be.
Long story short: it's application dependent. I don't think it would be
useful to bake that feature into Riak. My advice is to design in depth,
modularize systems that handle critical data to reduce their
vulnerability surface, and plan for each layer to be compromised
progressively. It can buy you some time.
--Kyle
On 05/03/2011 05:26 AM, David Greenstein wrote:
This is a question/survey on people's approach to security and
appetite for baked in security features to Riak/NoSQL. A typical
exploit path hackers take is to exploit a public facing application
(like the application server, of which there typically numerous
vulnerabilities), determine the data source and credentials by
exploring the application code and it's network activity, access the
db and steal info. Firewalls do not help in this case since the data
store is being accessed from a legitimate source. So, database
authentication and password encryption on the client is pretty key
here.
What are people's typical approach to protecting against this
scenario? Is it a reverse proxy (not sure if this really solves the
problem give the request is from a legit host)? Also, what are
people's appetite for baked in features in Riak to do db
authentication and help with password encryption and key mgt on the
client?
Seems like an important feature for anyone dealing with compliance.
Thank you! Dave _______________________________________________
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