Re: Postgres security issue - protecting datafiles - Mailing list pgsql-admin

From Zvi Fer
Subject Re: Postgres security issue - protecting datafiles
Date
Msg-id 96f635390806100022o11e0d033v782ff30c56391778@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Postgres security issue - protecting datafiles  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Postgres security issue - protecting datafiles
List pgsql-admin
Thnx for the input.
 
I have another solution, which i tried to avoid : my company provides file/folder-level encryption . i can apply this encryption with specific configuration for the postgres processes . this way - even the root cannot access the data, the only one that can access the database-files is the owner of the database (which can be the DBA , but can be some1 else as well...)
 
I tried to avoid this solution, but now i understand that i don't have any other choice.
encrypting the data will be useless, because i cannot SELECT by text/range/dates....
 
tnx

 
On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
zferentz@gmail.com writes:
> I'd like to use postgres to store my secret data  in a way that only
> me (the DBA, owner of the table) can access the talbe while the root
> (system administrator) who installed and maintains the server - will
> not be able to see the data.

If you think you can hide anything on a machine from its root admin,
I have a bridge I'd like to sell you ...

The only thing you could do along this line is to use the database as a
dumb container for encrypted data that you decrypt only on the client
side, using keys that are never sent to the database server.
Unfortunately that approach loses most of the benefit of using a
database in the first place, since you can hardly do any useful
processing on data that you can't decrypt.

                       regards, tom lane

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