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#Encryption

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In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding a message or information in such a way that only authorized parties can access it and those who are not authorized cannot.

A request came from a customer to estimate how long it would take to encrypt a database with cvencrypt utility.

This question is a little bit like how long is a piece of string — it depends. But its an interesting question. The answer primarily depends on the performance of CPU and storage on the target platform the customer is using, so the answer is more about coming up with a simple methodology that can be used to benchmark the CPU and storage while running cvencrypt.

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Overview

Encryption of sensitive data becomes more and more important for applications. For example patient names, SSN, address-data or credit card-numbers etc..

Cache supports different flavors of encryption. Block-level database encryption and data-element encryption. The block-level database encryption protects an entire database. The decryption/encryption is done when a block is written/read to or from the database and has very little impact on the performance.

With data-element encryption only certain data-fields are encrypted. Fields that contain sensitive data like patient data or credit-card numbers. Data-element encryption is also useful if a re-encryption is required periodically. With data-element encryption it is the responsibility of the application to encrypt/decrypt the data.

Both encryption methods leverage the managed key encryption infrastructure of Caché.

The following article describes a sample use-case where data-element encryption is used to encrypt person data.

But what if you have hundreds of thousands of records with an encrypted datafield and you have the need to search that field? Decryption of the field-values prior to the search is not an option. What about indices?

This article describes a possible solution and develops step-by-step a small example how you can use SQL and indices to search encrypted fields.

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IRIS can use a KMS (Key Managment Service) as of release 2023.3. Intersystems documentation is a good resource on KMS implementation but does not go into details of the KMS set up on the system, nor provide an easily followable example of how one might set this up for basic testing.

The purpose of this article is to supplement the docs with a brief explanation of KMS, an example of its use in IRIS, and notes for setup of a testing system on AWS EC2 RedHat Linux system using the AWS KMS. It is assumed in this document that the reader/implementor already has access/knowledge to set up an AWS EC2 Linux system running IRIS (2023.3 or later), and that they have proper authority to access the AWS KMS and AWS IAM (for creating roles and polices), or that they will be able to get this access either on their own or via their organizations Security contact in charge of their AWS access.

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About regulations

Personal data privacy regulations have become an indispensable requirement for projects dealing with personal data. The compliance with these laws is based on 4 principles:

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Several steps should be done in order to secure the connection through xDBC clients to an IRIS Server instance using TLS. Most of the information can be obtained from the documentation about TLS on IRIS here, about configuring the security layer for encrypted connections. In the next paragraphs we will cover an step-by-step guide on how to configure and test the connection using SQL Clients apps using ODBC and JDBC.

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In this article, we will establish an encrypted JDBC connection between Tableau Desktop and InterSystems IRIS database using a JDBC driver.
While documentation on configuring TLS with Java clients covers all possible topics on establishing an encrypted JDBC connection, configuring it with Tableau might be a little bit tricky, so I decided to write it down.

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Article
· Feb 24, 2017 1m read
Collision for SHA-1 hash algorithm

The recent announcement of a collision for the SHA-1 hash algorithm has caused some consternation:

https://shattered.io/

Here is some background to help put this in perspective.

Cryptographic hash functions can have a variety of properties. The property at issue here is:

"Collision resistance - it is computationally infeasible to find any two distinct inputs x, x' which hash to the same output, i.e., such that h(x) = h(x')."

(Menezes, van Oorchot, and Vanstone, "Handbook of Applied Cryptography", section 9.2.2)

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Now I want to return a large amount of data to the front end. The string length has reached 40000 +, and the returned data needs to be encrypted by AES + Base64. I can convert the string into a stream. AES can use the AESCBCEncryptStream method to encrypt, but Base64 has no stream method。Anyone who get the solution would you kindly share the solution please。

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

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Hello; We are managing several Ensemble instances on several servers. One server has 4 instances, and two other servers have one instance each (those are production servers). We encrypt all instances using the Caché encryption in the management portal.

Currently we are using two different encryption keys: 1 key on the server with 4 instances, which is used for all 4 instances, and a second key on single-instance server. ( I'm installing the newest production server now.)

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Hi, Community!

Please find the Developer Community Video of the week on InterSystems Developers YouTube Channel:

System Sizing for Insanely Large Deployments

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yjql-j8cGJo
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

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Hi Community,

Can I please check what the size limit for the parameter in $SYSTEM.Encryption.Base64Decode() method ?

I have a 12 page base64 encoded PDF document, which is failing when decoded. I am getting the error below:

ERROR <Ens>ErrException: <ILLEGAL VALUE>zXSDToLogical+1^%Library.Binary.1 -- logged as '-' number - @''

OBX:5 size=4233781

I tried the below from terminal, but it is not able copy the whole string for the parameter so couldn't execute it.

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We've implemented SAML authentication for our application where we are the service provider and various other entities are the identity providers. We've done successful connections with several identity providers including Okta, Duo Mobile, Ping Identity, and Azure. Validating the SAML response with signed assertions has been working great. Now, I am trying implement support for the SAML assertions in the response being encrypted for a new identity provider and struggling to understand procedurally how to go about this.

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So I have a base string that I want to sign using RSA-SHA256. I have a .p12 file and passphrase to get the RSA Private key using NodeJS (pem.readPkcs12 library), which I don't know how to do that in intersystems as well. (would appreciate if you can include a solution for that too)

The main problem here is I am trying to sign a string and print the result to terminal, using the code below in a routine (.mac file).

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Hi All,

Hopefully someone can help me with this case. I need to encrypt a text(querystring) with an AES265 encryption. An other vendor is decrypting this information. I have a working class in C#. I've tried to build the same in Objectscript for the encrypt part but there's a missing link somewhere. What's the difference between the C# and Objectscript implementation?

Objectscript code (until now):

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Credentials for a Productions are stored as plain text in ^Ens.SecondaryData.Password and exposed as plain text via SQL table Ens_Config.Credentials which is not ideal as only admins should know the credentials.

I can create my own adapter etc... to store and use encrypted passwords but does anyone know if there is a standard way to do this in a Production?

Alternatively, am I missing how to secure this so the production can run and someone can monitor and operate a production without access to the SQL table or global?

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Question
· Dec 2, 2021
SNN Encryption

I need to store an equivalent of the SNN (Social Security number). I need it to be encrypted and I'll have to be able to search for it once stored.

For what I've seen my options are:

- SHAHash from the %system.encryption library. Simple and easy to implement. My question is, might collisions be a problem? We are talking about a 10 millions entry.

- AES encryption. In this case I'd like to know if there is a standard way for key management in the InterSystems environment.

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I would like to know if an encrypted caché database can run significantly slower than a normal "unencrypted" database, in a way that is noticeable to the end user (e.g. slower response time for most pages, especially the ones that rely on read/writing to globals).

I searched in Intersystems knowledge base and couldn't find anything related. I'm looking for possible before/after benchmarks.

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Can the built-in $System.Encryption.TOTP() function be used in conjunction with Authenticator Apps (e.g. Google, Microsoft, and so on)?

Providing the same secret/key to a variety of authentication apps, they all return the same synchronized value. However, passing the same secret/key to $System.Encryption.TOTP() is generating a different value (with all instances executing at the same time for comparison).

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Asymmetric cryptography is a cryptographic system that uses pairs of keys: public keys which may be disseminated widely, and private keys which are known only to the owner. The generation of such keys depends on cryptographic algorithms based on mathematical problems to produce one-way functions. Effective security only requires keeping the private key private; the public key can be openly distributed without compromising security.

In such a system, any person can encrypt a message using the receiver's public key, but that encrypted message can only be decrypted with the receiver's private key.

Robust authentication is also possible. A sender can combine a message with a private key to create a short digital signature on the message. Anyone with the sender's corresponding public key can combine the same message and the supposed digital signature associated with it to verify whether the signature was valid, i.e. made by the owner of the corresponding private key. (C) Wikipedia.

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I am using the Java Binding to connect a Java Middleware Application to Cache. Originally I was using a CacheListOfDataTypes (JAVATYPE = "java.lang.List") object to bring data back. I was tasked with encrypting the data using AES and I was using the AESCBCEncrypt function on the List elements (up to 20k characters for each element) to bring it back before concatenating it on the middleware. This almost worked. Like 95% of the characters were being decrypted correctly but some text was coming back garbled. I couldn't understand how this was happening.

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