Re: storing an explicit nonce - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Bruce Momjian
Subject Re: storing an explicit nonce
Date
Msg-id 20211012112817.GA19310@momjian.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: storing an explicit nonce  (Ants Aasma <ants@cybertec.at>)
Responses Re: storing an explicit nonce  (Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 08:40:17AM +0300, Ants Aasma wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Oct 2021 at 22:15, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> 
>     > Yes, that's the direction that I was thinking also and specifically with
>     > XTS as the encryption algorithm to allow us to exclude the LSN but keep
>     > everything else, and to address the concern around the nonce/tweak/etc
>     > being the same sometimes across multiple writes.  Another thing to
>     > consider is if we want to encrypt zero'd page.  There was a point
>     > brought up that if we do then we are encrypting a fair bit of very
>     > predictable bytes and that's not great (though there's a fair bit about
>     > our pages that someone could quite possibly predict anyway based on
>     > table structures and such...).  I would think that if it's easy enough
>     > to not encrypt zero'd pages that we should avoid doing so.  Don't recall
>     > offhand which way zero'd pages were being handled already but thought it
>     > made sense to mention that as part of this discussion.
> 
>     Yeah, I wanted to mention that.  I don't see any security difference
>     between fully-zero pages, pages with headers and no tuples, and pages
>     with headers and only a few tuples.  If any of those are insecure, they
>     all are.  Therefore, I don't see any reason to treat them differently.
> 
> 
> We had to special case zero pages and not encrypt them because as far as I can
> tell, there is no atomic way to extend a file and initialize it to Enc(zero) in
> the same step.

Oh, good point.  Yeah, we will need to handle that.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        https://momjian.us
  EDB                                      https://enterprisedb.com

  If only the physical world exists, free will is an illusion.




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