Per-Field Symmetric Encryption within Java

[James Green]

Hi,

Our app currently works in Glassfish 3 and uses Morphia. We have not yet hit production. I now have a requirement to encrypt selected fields of some of my entity models.

An encryption key will exist on a per-customer basis.

Where do I look for doing this stuff? I've only been doing "Java" really this year so I have a vague awareness of Java having an encryption API. I see Spring Security and Jasypt exist too.

Ideally, something that operates almost transparently would be great. At least, apart from setting the key, there ought to be minimal code needed. Perhaps something in place of Morphia if that opens possibilities.

Thanks for any advice given.

James

[Scott Hernandez]

You can add an annotation in Morphia to make this pretty transparent
to the application, or use the lifecycle methods so your java objects
never know it is happening. I would imagine it working much like
@Serialized.

The more important ramifications are that in the database you will not
be able to search on these fields (except for exact matches possibly)
since the data in encrypted.

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[James Green]

I'm not concerned about searching on encrypted fields - the searchable ones are used for operations and have no personal data at all.

Regarding @Serialized, how does this actually work? I am wondering which components do what.

Thanks,

James

[Scott Hernandez]

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 8:17 AM, James Green <james.m...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not concerned about searching on encrypted fields - the searchable ones
> are used for operations and have no personal data at all.
>
> Regarding @Serialized, how does this actually work? I am wondering which
> components do what.

It will call the java serialization system and store the raw bytes in
a binary field.