[CASSANDRA-7922] Add file-level encryption

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Open
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Fix Version/s: 5.x
• Component/s: Legacy/Core
• Labels: encryption security
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jason Brown
• Created: 13/Sep/14 04:52
• Updated: 07/Mar/23 10:54

Description

Umbrella ticket for file-level encryption

Some use cases require encrypting files at rest for certain compliance needs: the health­care industry (HIPAA regulations), the card payment industry (PCI DSS regulations) or the US government (FISMA regulations). File system encryption can be used in some situations, but does not solve all problems.

I can foresee the following components needing at-rest encryption:

• sstables (data, index, and summary files) (CASSANDRA-9633)
• commit log (CASSANDRA-6018)
• hints (CASSANDRA-11040)
• some systems tables (batches, not sure if any others)
• index/row cache
• secondary indexes

The work for those items would be separate tickets, of course. I have a working version of most of the above components working in 2.0, which I need to ship in production now, but it's too late for the 2.0 branch and unclear for 2.1.

Other products, such as Oracle/SqlServer/Datastax Enterprise commonly refer to at-rest encryption as Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), and I'm happy to stick with that convention, here, as well.