The downside of this approach is they actually have to implement it themselves and encryption in general is not very developer-friendly: one has to know the ins and outs of a specific cryptographic algorithm, properly generate keys, nonces, IVs etc. With application level encryption the application maintainers can apply any encryption code they please to any particular data they need. Generally, the higher in the stack we apply encryption, the more flexibility we have. And, similar to the OSI model, one can apply encryption at different layers (think about TLS vs IPsec or a VPN).įor data at rest we can apply encryption either at the block layers (either in hardware or in software) or at the file level (either directly in applications or in the filesystem). The concept of the storage stack is actually similar to the well-known network OSI model, where each layer has a more high-level view of the information and the implementation details of the lower layers are abstracted away from the upper layers. Finally, the block subsystem actually passes the block reads and writes to the underlying hardware using appropriate device drivers. The file system in the OS kernel keeps track of which blocks of the underlying block device belong to which files and translates these file reads and writes into block reads and writes, however the hardware specifics of the underlying storage device is abstracted away from the filesystem. On the top of the stack are applications, which read and write data in files (or streams). A simplified version of the storage stack and encryption solutions can be found on the diagram below: Available techniques are tightly coupled with a typical OS storage stack. When it comes to encrypting data at rest there are several ways it can be implemented on a modern operating system (OS). In this post, we will investigate the performance of disk encryption on Linux and explain how we made it at least two times faster for ourselves and our customers! Encrypting data at rest Many companies, however, don't encrypt their disks, because they fear the potential performance penalty caused by encryption overhead.Įncrypting data at rest is vital for Cloudflare with more than 200 data centres across the world. Data encryption at rest is a must-have for any modern Internet company.
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