[jira] [Created] (CASSANDRA-14107) Introduce simple key alias versioning scheme for TDE

["Stefan Podkowinski (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Stefan Podkowinski created CASSANDRA-14107:
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             Summary: Introduce simple key alias versioning scheme for TDE
                 Key: CASSANDRA-14107
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-14107
             Project: Cassandra
          Issue Type: New Feature
            Reporter: Stefan Podkowinski
            Priority: Minor


Handling of encryption keys as introduced in CASSANDRA-9945 takes place by referencing a key alias in either cassandra.yaml, or the header of the (commitlog/hints) file that has been encrypted. Using the alias as literal value will work, but requires some attention when rotating keys.

Currently each time a key is rotated (i.e. adding a new key to the keystore while preserving the previous version), the alias in cassandra.yaml has to be update as well and the node needs to be restarted. It would be more convenient to use a symbolic reference instead. My suggestion here would be to use "<alias>:last" for referring to the latest version. Omitting the ":<version>" part altogether would have the same effect. In this case Cassandra always picks the latest key when the key cache has been expired.

The non-trivial part of this suggestion is how the "latest" key is referenced in the file header. If we use "latest", e.g. for the commit log header, and the key gets rotated, we'd now try do decrypt the file with the new key, instead of the key it has been created with. Therefor we'd have to introduce an extra step that will resolve the canonical version for "latest" and refer to that one during any encrypt operation. 




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