search

bloom-housing / bloom

Bloom is Exygy’s affordable housing platform. Bloom's goal is to be a single entry point for affordable housing seekers and a hub for application and listing management for developers.
https://bloomhousing.com
Apache License 2.0
33 stars 25 forks source link

Support app-level encryption of certain DB columns #350

Open bk3c opened 4 years ago

bk3c commented 4 years ago

Basic encryption of our backend database is automatically handled by Heroku at the AWS / EBS layer, which means that everything is encrypted at rest from machine/filesystem-based attacks. That said, there's likely to be demand for additional encryption of within the DB itself, to provide extra protection for especially sensitive PII (e.g. SSNs, if we ever have to ask for them) from an attacker who gains SQL-level access to the database.

I'm aware of things like PGCrypto, but I'm not sure what that buys us over just doing something at the typeorm level, so I'd default to making our implementation DB-independent. Once we do this, we'll also need to make sure we have all of the process stuff sorted around managing the encryption key, perhaps with AWS or GCP KMS? If we decide to get extra fancy, we could even do BYOK on Heroku Shield, or at that point we might want to have the DB elsewhere given the pricing...

bk3c commented 4 years ago

There do seem to be some existing modules for TypeORM like https://github.com/generalpiston/typeorm-encrypted, but it's not clear that the popularity and maintenance is quite there.

ludtkemorgan commented 1 year ago

Keeping this ticket alive to potentially do a spike in the future