Encryption, paranoia and virtual machines

[Jamon Camisso]

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On 11/25/2011 12:35 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
> Translucent databases provide better, deeper protection by scrambling
> the data with encryption algorithms. The solutions use the minimal
> amount of encryption to ensure that the database is still functional.
> In the best applications, the personal and sensitive information is
> protected but the database still delivers the information."
> 
> The approach that Wayner's book takes is that data that is supposed to
> be secure is encrypted before it reaches the host, with the
> consequence that encryption keys never need to be on that host, which
> is essential to maintain trust when you *don't* trust the system
> administrator.

That's an interesting approach and makes sense for some use cases.
However, it presumes that unencrypted data coming from source X never
hits a disk somewhere. If X doesn't have disk encryption for every
location where data might be written, then it is a weak point regardless
of how secure the database is.

For example, assuming physical access, what is to prevent someone from
running a forensic recovery tool on say /var/spool files, or on a swap
partition if either location handled data destined for the encrypted
database?

For me at least, while encrypting the whole disk is definitely a
shot-gun approach, the overhead is slight and reduces complexity. I
certainly don't notice any performance issues with AES on an SSD.

Jamon
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