First, you face key model and cryptosystem choice challenges, which hide under “which library/tool should I use for this?” Hopefully, you chose a tool that fits your use-case security-wise, not the one with the most stars on GitHub.Whoever is formally assigned with the job of implementing encryption-based data protection, faces thousands of pages of documentation on how to implement things better, but very little on how to design things correctly.ĭesign exercises turn out to be a bumpy ride every time you don’t expect the need for design and have a sequence of ad-hoc decisions because you anticipated getting things done quickly: Unless well-defined, the task for application-level encryption is frequently underestimated, poorly implemented, and results in haphazard architectural compromises when developers find out that integrating a cryptographic library or service is just the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes I will use existing software as an example and sometimes you will have to bear with me as we imagine completely new software designs! Encryption starts from the design In this article, I will walk you through the basics of different application-level encryption approaches, their pros and cons, typical mistakes, and threat models. So, as architects explore options of doing more, they stumble upon the ever-ambiguous application-level encryption, field-level encryption, client-side encryption, end-to-end encryption requirement.Īs CTO of data security company Cossack Labs, I deal with these concerns a lot both for our products and while helping customers choose their encryption-strategy wisely. Previous generation measures are just the starting point: encrypting the filesystem (data-at-rest encryption) protects against someone stealing disks from your data center and setting up TLS (data-in-motion encryption) prevents wiretapping and simple impersonation, but that’s it. Get a front-row seat to the future of IoT data infrastructure at EMQ. The world’s most scalable and reliable MQTT messaging platform for mission-critical IoT scenarios. Some of them (for example, searching encrypted data) have been addressed with understandable tradeoffs, some are unique and need to be considered separately. ALE protects from more risks than transport and at-rest encryption, but at the cost of tradeoffs.The encryption subsystem works better when integrated with others to form defense-in-depth: with access control, logging, intrusion detection, request authentication, and data leakage prevention.ALE can be implemented in various ways to address different security requirements-from end-to-end encryption and zero trust architectures to partial field-level database encryption.Encryption is easy, key management is hard-any encryption process requires key management infrastructure and several additional supporting processes, which should be aligned with your systems architecture, FRs, and NFRs.Application-level encryption (ALE) means encrypting data within the application, and not depending on the underlying transport and/or at-rest encryption.
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