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Database encryption (was: commit: ldap/doc/man/man5 slapd-bdb.5)

Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com> writes:

> I doubt it, of course. It exacts a performance penalty on every DB
> operation, so I don't think anyone will be able to use this
> long-term. For the off-site backup scenario, it makes more sense to just
> encrypt the backup images (tar format or whatever backup utility is
> used). That way you only spend cycles on encryption once, at backup
> time. Any site that's savvy enough to do automated backups can certainly
> figure out how to protect those backups with encryption.

The one place where I could see using this is if one is using OpenLDAP as
the backend to a Kerberos KDC.  It's considered best practice right now to
always encrypt the KDC database at rest on disk, and some sites even
require an administrator be present with a USB key to unlock the database
whenever a KDC has to be rebooted.  Given the increasing interest in using
LDAP as a backend store for the KDC, this may be a simpler method for
providing equivalent KDC security without encrypting various bits of data
individually.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>