Database Encryption - How to Balance Security with Performance

Abstract

Encryption can provide strong security for data at rest, but developing a database encryption strategy must take many factors into consideration. Organizations must balance between the requirement for security and the desire for excellent performance. Encryption at the database level, versus application level and file level has proved to be the ideal method to protect sensitive data and deliver performance. There are a multitude of architectures and techniques to improve performance: the alternatives fall into two broad categories -alternative topologies to decrease encryption overhead and techniques to limit the number of encryption operations. In addition, performance and security, in real-world scenarios, are complex issues and experts should be used who understand all available options and the impact for each particular customer environment. Every organization must protect sensitive data or suffer potential legislative, regulatory, legal and brand consequences. Relying on perimeter security and database access control does not provide adequate security. Packaged database encryption solutions have proven to be the best alternative to protect sensitive data. This is a specialized and complex solution area and if internal resources don't have the cryptography expertise in relation to IT environment, outside expertise should be used to ensure superior performance. This paper reviews the performance aspects of three dominant topologies for database encryption.

Development of a Cryptographic Solution Based on Kerberos for Database Security

“…Author [3] compares how different protection, software or hardware implementations of the database affect the relationship between the level of security and performance. In their research they had discovered that AES algorithm's performances are better than RSA's or Blowfish's.…”

Using Record Level Encryption for Securing Information in Classified Information Systems

“…AES algorithm is chosen to be used for encryption/decryption due to its performance and variable key length (128, 192 and 256 bits). Based on the work of (Mattsson, 2005) AES is preferred to be used for security and for performance. An example for symmetric algorithms performance in Java is shown in Figure 7, which confirms that AES is faster even if we compare it with the Triple DES algorithm, which is well known for symmetric encryption processes.…”

Cost and Performance-Based Resource Selection Scheme for Asynchronous Replicated System in Utility-Based Computing Environment

“…where α is the ID (i.e., USN) of a job that is last originated in the system and β is the largest ID of a job in . As previously mentioned, these delays may be caused by complex interactions between heterogeneous resource hardware, software, networking and security [36]. It can be understood that the reliability criterion is used to measure the performance robustness of a resource.…”