Emmanuel Lecharny wrote:
as I need to rewrite the serialization for ServerEntry, ServerAttribute, ServerValue, DN, RDN and AttributeTypeAndValue, I have had some ideas, and I would like to know your opinion :

- what about adding a flag to tell the serialization methods (those classes are Externalizable) to encrypt/decrypt the data on disk ? Tis would be a much better solution than to define an encryption option to be added to all the attributes (like "cn;encrypted=fR5*za"). All the data will be encrypted before being serialized to disk. It would be off by default, of course
To make the encryption cryptographically sound, the message to be encrypted must be sufficiently random. In a scheme where each entry is encrypted individually, this requires an initialization vector (i.e. some random bits) which amounts to relatively high percentage of wasted space. A scheme where the encryption happens in larger chunks (e.g. B-Tree nodes or pages) will typically have better "randomness" in the first place and reduce the space wasted by the iv. I don't know how the storage engine works at the bottom end, but I'd guess that this would be a better place to do encryption.

Joerg Henne

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