RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000
From: Fred Langston (Fred.Langston_at_guardent.com)
Date: 01/23/04
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To: 'Eric McCarty' <eric@lawmpd.com>, andreas <andreas@san-andreas.com>, silkm@hushmail.com, kcasey@nanoweb.com, focus-ms@securityfocus.com Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 01:36:50 -0500
Yep, you missed the point on both. The thread has moved to general Db
encryption questions, as the example is much more limited in scope than what
most people are doing with Db encryption; namely, meeting HIPAA, GLBA,
SB1386 and credit card company encryption requirements like Visa CISP. If
you use EFS to encrypt, a compromised account that is used for EFS
encryption will expose any data anywhere that's encrypted with EFS. If you
use a non-user account based encryption technology, which is just about
everything else except EFS and CFS, you can have a rogue admin or
compromised admin account and *still not expose encrypted data*. Yes, you
have big problems, but you will not have to go through the mandatory
reporting or huge fines associated with the regulations. That's the first
point.
2nd point - Most companies need the ability to encrypt portions of a record
(credit card number, SSN, etc.) but still be able to search or query other
fields in the database. In addition, the use of hashes of sensitive data
fields stored together with the same encrypted data field allows queries
based on comparing hash values rather than decrypting sensitive data fields
or the database as a whole, lowering overhead and greatly increasing
security. Your statement "Second, if a malicious attacker uses a web app to
run queries against the DB, the attacker would get the unencrypted output
anyway as he/she is running in the context of an account that SHOULD have
access" is exactly why you should encrypt only rows/columns - you do not
have the web app-user context problem! We're not allowing web app users to
query credit card numbers, for example, because there's no business need; we
are providing the ability query all other non-sensitive data fields so they
can do there work. Ever so a receipt with XXs for the first 7 digits of a
credit card number? They do that so an account rep can handle issues with
the order without giving them access to the sensitive data. It's all part
of 'need-to-know access to data' concepts.
Your book analogy escapes me.
Business users never dictate security, but they absolutely dictate business
requirements. If you can't provide the business function that a system is
designed to provide, you utterly failed no matter how secure a system is.
No one ever stayed in business with a system so secure that it does nothing.
Fred Langston, CISSP
Senior Principal Consultant
W: 206.903.8147 x223 F: 206.903.1862 M: 425.765.3330
Seattle, WA www.Guardent.com
________________________________________
G U A R D E N T
Enterprise Security and Privacy Programs
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric McCarty [mailto:eric@lawmpd.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 7:59 AM
To: Fred Langston; andreas; silkm@hushmail.com; kcasey@nanoweb.com;
focus-ms@securityfocus.com
Subject: RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000
While I agree EFS is a poor choice for this purpose. Should you have a
"compromised admin account or rogue admin anywhere on your domain..." I
think
* Annual employee salaries
* Commissions
* Wages
Would be the least of your worries.
I suppose I've missed the intent of encryption within a SQL db. Why would
you want to encrypt data inside a database?. First, if people can run
queries against these tables and get results, you have incorrect database
security. Second, if a malicious attacker uses a web app to run queries
against the DB, the attacker would get the unencrypted output anyway as
he/she is running in the context of an account that SHOULD have access.
If we use the analogy of a book, if you can't get to the book, you can't
read it. If the need comes about to send the text of the book across the
wire, you should use SSL to encrypt it and decrypt it so people can't read
it.
Lastly, since when did business users dictate security? *Flame suit on!*
Eric McCarty
-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Langston [mailto:Fred.Langston@guardent.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 9:34 AM
To: 'andreas'; silkm@hushmail.com; kcasey@nanoweb.com;
focus-ms@securityfocus.com
Subject: RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000
EFS is probably the worst approach to this problem and should me avoided in
all but the smallest installations when applied in this manner. You need
encryption technology designed for this type of application, not a
user/filesystem based encryption system.
One compromised admin account or rogue admin anywhere on your domain and EFS
is compromised as well. Performance is dismal as well if used for this
purpose.
EFS has it's place, but not here.
Fred Langston, CISSP
Senior Principal Consultant
W: 206.903.8147 x223 F: 206.903.1862 M: 425.765.3330
Seattle, WA www.Guardent.com
________________________________________
G U A R D E N T
Enterprise Security and Privacy Programs
-----Original Message-----
From: andreas [mailto:andreas@san-andreas.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 1:39 PM
To: silkm@hushmail.com; kcasey@nanoweb.com; focus-ms@securityfocus.com
Subject: RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000
True, but my SQL guys are my ASP programmers. While correct application of
DB encryption would preclude the DBAs from mucking about in the data, they
very well may be the ones implementing the technology.
There are plenty of resources, Microsoft being one of them, but as to it
being applicable, understandable or available that is a different story.
Technet is of little help when trying to figure out how to employ EFS for
database protection or even get an idea of the best practices for having a
single encrypted table.
Andreas
-----Original Message-----
From: silkm@hushmail.com [mailto:silkm@hushmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 4:27 PM
To: kcasey@nanoweb.com; focus-ms@securityfocus.com; andreas@san-andreas.com
Subject: RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000
Well the point here is the DBA's don't need to know anything about the
encrypted data ... just have them create tables to hold it.
You need to educate your progammers on how to encrypt it, and there are
plenty of resources for that no matter what language you choose.
-----Original Message-----
From: andreas [mailto:andreas@san-andreas.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 21 January 2004 1:19 AM
To: 'Kevin E. Casey'; focus-ms@securityfocus.com
Subject: RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000
Any good resources for researching/educating my DBAs? I have not had luck
finding specific enough information on the subjects. My DB skills here are
not as strong as I would like them to be, and not as strong as they will
need to be in the future.
Thanks!
Andreas Barbiero
CTO ETS/Financialcampus
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin E. Casey [mailto:kcasey@nanoweb.com]
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 12:01 PM
To: focus-ms@securityfocus.com
Subject: RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000
If you need to encrypt data in 3 columns and 3 columns only, your best bet
is to do the encryption at the application (in its data tier) level. Using
.NET (or other tools), gives you a good range/assortment of tools and
sencryption schemes to encrypt that confidential data. This keeps your DBAs
from snooping around. Keeps backup copies safe from prying eyes and it also
keeps the performance hit for en/decryption at the client (or web server
level).
-----Original Message-----
From: Nero, Nick [mailto:Nick.Nero@disney.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 5:09 PM
To: Eduardo.Ortiz@alderwoods.com; focus-ms@securityfocus.com
Subject: RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000
Encrypting data on a database is tricky. If you must have table/row level
encryption, then it is really tough to find a decent product and performance
is abyssmal. I recently authored a document that proposes using Microsoft's
own EFS to encrypt the whole volume where the Database is. This solution
was easy, performed great (about 5-25% hit on performance compared to 400%
on DBCrypt) and best of all it is free. I would strongly recommend using
Windows 2003 server for your SQL2k since its version of EFS uses AES at
256bit. Otherwise you need to hack the reg on Win2k to enable 3DES
encryption. Either is not gonna get cracked by someone anytime soon. The
beauty of this solution is that you encrypt the database with the SQL
Service account so that only that account can read the data. That way even
an local admin on the box cannot access the data. You could even boot to a
NTFS boot disk and the data would be encrypted. This depends on proper key
management (as all crytpo plans do) so you have to ensure you use a domain
account or roaming profile so the encryption key can not be exploited
locally (see http://www.elcomsoft.com/aefsdr.html for more on this
exploit)
and domain recovery agent policy. Still we feel it delivers extremely
secure databases, acceptable performance and zero cost.
We tested several products and I believe DBEncrypt (or maybe DbCrypt) was
one of them. They all were several thousand dollars per server (and that
was for a license of over 100 servers), and would require massive hardware
investments to compensate for the performance penalty. Like I said, If you
must have row/table level encryption to protect against other DBA's then you
are stuck. At that point I would say you should either limit who has SA
access, or more strongly background check those that do cause that level of
encryption will cost you far more. A DB on an encrypted drive with strong
application level security (ie, custom views), would only be breakable at
the app or by getting SA credentials. There are far easier targets out
there.
-----Original Message-----
From: Eduardo.Ortiz@alderwoods.com [mailto:Eduardo.Ortiz@alderwoods.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 1:02 PM
To: focus-ms@securityfocus.com
Subject: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000
Hello,
We are implementing an Enterprise Data Warehouse. We already have data
regarding different business process. Now we need to include Payroll data in
our SQL Server (2000) database. Business users have specific security
requirements about this sensitive data. They want to secure the following
information:
* Annual employee salaries
* Commissions
* Wages
This information is stored in two tables and are three different columns. We
have already implemented a tight security schema for the server, database
and user groups (active directory), but business users want more security.
Now we are planning to encrypt the data (just these three
columns) in the database. I did not find any function in SQL Server to
encrypt data. I found a tool provided by Application Security Inc
(http://www.appsecinc.com) called DbEncrypt. Have you guys heard or worked
with tool? Do you any suggestion or recommendation to encrypt the data?
Thanks,
Eduardo Ortiz
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- Previous message: Mr. Momotaro: "RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000"
- Maybe in reply to: Eduardo.Ortiz_at_alderwoods.com: "Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000"
- Next in thread: Floyd Russell: "RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000"
- Reply: Floyd Russell: "RE: Encrypt data - SQL Server 2000"
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