Re:Why Amazon S3 server side encryption (SSE-S3) is misleading
by neilv on Monday January 16, 2023 @02:26PM
(#34404486)
Earlier in AWS, when I was migrating a complex sensitive system from self-hosted servers, there was a requirement not to leave data at rest in S3 unencrypted, and there was no suitable S3 feature for this.
Since I had to write the AWS API from scratch anyway (fringe language, and we tried to avoid C memory problems), I also implemented transparent encryption at the same time. (Using an off-the-shelf vetted implementation of appropriate encryption algorithms. And in such a way that, when handling large data, it could run on other cores if no accelerator.)
Of course, as the article points out, the EC2 instances (or whatever needs to access the data within the objects in S3) by definition need access, but at least that access is restricted more closely to what actually needs it.
Since I had to write the AWS API from scratch anyway (fringe language, and we tried to avoid C memory problems), I also implemented transparent encryption at the same time. (Using an off-the-shelf vetted implementation of appropriate encryption algorithms. And in such a way that, when handling large data, it could run on other cores if no accelerator.)
Of course, as the article points out, the EC2 instances (or whatever needs to access the data within the objects in S3) by definition need access, but at least that access is restricted more closely to what actually needs it.