[Techtalk] mongodb with encryption?

[John Sturdy]

and again...

I'm trying to avoid the learning curve of switching to a database
technology that I'm not familiar with, and avoid having to do a migration
any time we want to change what we store in the user's profile.

So, would an encrypted database really be any better than a database on an
encrypted filesystem?  (Mongodb's encryption is in the enterprise version
only, but we want to use a free system.)

__John (sorry about the partial messages, I'm still getting used to a very
different keyboard!)

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:07 PM, John Sturdy <jcg.sturdy at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sorry, accidentally hit send...
> I'm tryin
>
> On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:06 PM, John Sturdy <jcg.sturdy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been writing a membership and training management database system
>> for my local hackerspace, and because of GDPR I've been asked to separate
>> out the Personal Identifying Data (basically any profile data that could be
>> used to harass someone) into a separate, encrypted database, which is to be
>> encrypted at rest.  The overall architecture of the system is that login,
>> sessions, authentication, and URL dispatch are all handled by django, but
>> then the rest of it is handled in my python code, which supplies view
>> functions for django to use (i.e. my code makes up the whole page string,
>> without using django templates etc).  My code uses mongodb for all its
>> storage.  I've done it this way partly because I'm familiar with mongodb
>> and templateless HTML generation in python (in the way described at
>> https://bitbucket.org/tavisrudd/throw-out-your-templates/src) but not
>> with django and relational databases; and I want the flexibility that mongo
>> provides, and don't want to have to do django migrations whenever the form
>> of a user profile changes.
>>
>> My original idea was to keep information such as names and addresses in
>> the database that django uses to manage user accounts, but when I saw about
>> having to do migrations when these change, I decided I'd rather put almost
>> all that information into mongo, leaving a minimum (name, email and a UUID
>> to link the to the mongo database) in django's database, for flexibility
>> and minimal technical hassle, and also because we want to get the project
>> up and running ASAP.
>>
>> I'd been assuming that keeping the user profile database on an encrypted
>> filesystem would be as good as using a database that does encryption
>> itself.   However, the hackerspace committee's GDPR expert is encouraging
>> me to use an encrypted SQL database for this, but I really don't want the
>> learngin
>>
>
>