Major Description
The Connect framework does not easily support pluggable encryption and decryption mechanisms. It is possible to use custom Converters to encrypt/decrypt individual keys and values when the encryption metadata (keys, algorithm, etc.) can be specified in the Converter. or when the key and/or value are wrapped to include the metadata.
However, if the encryption metadata is to be stored as headers, then as of AK 1.1 Connect does have support for using headers in connectors and SMTs, but not Converters.
We should make it easier to plug encryption and decryption mechanisms into Connect. Since we're moving to Java 8, one approach might be to change the Converter interface to add a default methods that also supply the headers (and maybe the whole record).
An alternative is to define a new plugin interface that can be used to filter/transform/map the entire source and sink records. Here's we'd actually call this for source connectors before the Converter, and for sink connectors after the Converter is called.