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Enable encryption at rest

Overview

Data at rest within a YugabyteDB universe should be protected from unauthorized users by encrypting it. The Yugabyte Platform UI allows you to do the following:

There are two types of keys that are used to encrypt data in YugabyteDB:

  • Universe key: The top-level symmetric key used to encrypt other keys and are common to the universe.
  • Data key: The symmetric key used to encrypt data. There is one data key generated per flushed file.

For more information on the features, assumptions, design, data key management, universe keys, key rotations, master failures, and adding a node, see Encryption At Rest in YugabyteDB.

Enable encryption at rest during universe creation

You can enable encryption at rest during the universe creation as follows:

  1. Open the Yugabyte Platform UI and navigate to Universes.
  2. Click Create Universe to open the Universe Configuration page.
  3. After you select a provider, the Instance Configuration section expands to show more options.
  4. Select the Enable Encryption at Rest option. The Key Management Service Config option appears.
  5. Select your key management service (KMS) configuration from the Key Management Service Config list. The list displays only preconfigured KMS configurations. If you need to create one, see Create a KMS configuration using AWS KMS or Create a KMS configuration using HashiCorp Vault.
  6. Continue with your universe creation, then click Create.

You can verify that encryption at rest has been successfully configured as follows:

  1. Open the Yugabyte Platform UI and navigate to the universe.

  2. Select Nodes.

  3. On one of the nodes, click Master under the PROCESSES column to open the overview.

  4. To the right of Replication Factor, click See full config to open the Current Cluster Config page.

  5. Verify that the configuration includes the following encryption_info section with the correct values:

    encryption_info {
  encryption_enabled: true
  universe_key_registry_encoded: ".*"
  key_in_memory: true
  latest_version_id: ".*"
}

If your configuration includes AWS KMS, the following occurs: once the universe has been created with encryption at rest enabled, Yugabyte Platform persists the ciphertext of the universe key (because AWS does not persist any CMK-generated data keys themselves) and requests the plaintext of the universe key from AWS KMS using the KMS configuration whenever it needs to provide the universe key to the master nodes. For more information, see Create a KMS configuration using AWS KMS.

Enable encryption at rest on an existing universe

You can enable encryption at rest on an existing universe as follows:

  1. Open the Yugabyte Platform UI and click Universes.

  2. Select the universe for which to enable encryption.

  3. Select Actions > Edit Universe > Edit Security > Encryption-at-Rest.

  4. In the Manage Encryption at Rest dialog, toggle Enable Encryption at Rest for <universe_name>.

    When the encryption is enabled, the Key Management Service Config option appears.

  5. Select your KSM configuration from the Key Management Service Config list. The list displays only preconfigured KMS configurations. If you need to create one, see Create a KMS configuration using AWS KMS or Create a KMS configuration using HashiCorp Vault.

  6. Click Submit.

  7. Verify that the EnableEncryptionAtRest task completed successfully.

Back up and restore data from an encrypted at rest universe

When you back up and restore universe data with encryption at rest enabled, Yugabyte Platform requires a KMS configuration to manage backing up and restoring encrypted universe data. Because of the possibility that you will need to restore data to a different universe that might have a different universe key, Yugabyte Platform ensures that all encrypted backups include a metadata file (that includes a list of key IDs in the source's universe key registry). When restoring your universe data, Yugabyte Platform uses the selected KMS configuration to consume the universe key ID and then retrieve the universe key value for each key ID in the metadata file. Each of these keys are then sent to the destination universe to augment or build the universe key registry there.

Rotate the universe keys used for encryption at rest

Enabling encryption and rotating a new key works in two steps:

  1. Add the new universe key ID and key data to all the in-memory state of masters.
  2. Issue a cluster configuration change to enable encryption with the new key.

The cluster configuration change does the following:

  • Decrypts the universe key registry with the previous latest universe key.
  • Adds the new key to the registry.
  • Updates the cluster configuration with the new latest key ID.
  • Encrypts the registry with the new key.

Once encryption is enabled with a new key, only new data is encrypted with this new key. Old data remains unencrypted, or encrypted with an older key, until compaction churn triggers a re-encryption with the new key.

To rotate the universe keys, perform the following:

  1. Open the Yugabyte Platform UI and navigate to the universe for which you want to rotate the keys.
  2. Select Actions > Edit Universe > Edit Security > Encryption-at-Rest.
  3. Select Rotate Key and click Submit.

Disable encryption at rest

You can disable encryption at rest for a universe as follows:

  1. Open the Yugabyte Platform UI and navigate to the universe for which to disable encryption.
  2. Select Action > Edit Universe > Edit Security > Encryption-at-Rest.
  3. In the Manage Encryption at Rest dialog, toggle Enable Encryption at Rest for <universe_name> and click Submit.
  4. To verify that encryption at rest is disabled, check the current cluster configuration for each node to see that it contains encryption_enabled: false.
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