Encrypting Your Data

how-to

Enterprise Edition

A practical guide for getting started with Field-Level Encryption, showing how to encrypt and decrypt JSON fields using the Node.js SDK.

For a high-level overview of this feature, see our Encryption page.

Native Encryption at Rest

Server 8.x (and new Capella Operational clusters) offer encryption at rest. It’s a comprehensive way of encrypting all data in a non-ephemeral bucket, as well as logs, configuration data, and audit data. However, you may prefer the relative simplicity of key management in Field Level Encryption for use cases where there are a limited number of data to be encrypted.

Packaging

The Node.js SDK works together with the Node Couchbase Encryption library to provide support for encryption and decryption of JSON fields. This library makes use of the cryptographic algorithms available on your platform, and provides a framework for implementing your own crypto components.

The encryption code is packaged as an optional library and is subject to the Couchbase License and Enterprise Subscription License agreements. To use the encryption library, you have to explicitly include this dependency in your project configuration.

To get started with the Node encryption library you can fetch it using:

$ npm i cbfieldcrypt

Configuration

The Node.js Field-Level Encryption library works on the principle of Encrypters and Decrypters which can be packaged within a Provider, as well as a custom Transcoder. Encrypters and Decrypters are registered with a CryptoManager and are then used at serialization/deserialization time to encrypt and decrypt fields.

Here we’ll go through an example of setting up and using the Node Field-Level Encryption library.

To begin we need to create a couple of keys, you should not use the InsecureKeyring other than for evaluation purposes and should keep your keys secure.

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Now that we have keys we can create a Provider (here we use the AeadAes256CbcHmacSha512 algorithm which is the default supplied by the library). The Provider gives us a way to easily create multiple encrypters for the same algorithm but different keys. At this point we also create CryptoManager and register our encrypters and decrypters with it.

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Usage

Sensitive fields in your data classes can be encrypted by using a CryptoSchema. For example:

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Now let’s create a person document and save it to Couchbase:

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You can get the document to verify the fields were encrypted:

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The expected output is something like:

{
  firstName: 'Barry',
  lastName: 'Sheen',
  'encrypted$password': {
    alg: 'AEAD_AES_256_CBC_HMAC_SHA512',
    kid: 'mykey',
    ciphertext: 'iO2fCmlRqY5D55j8MemFwhMDIAQ33j8XRpcpFANSXmI7HHmlHUopfu7plkH1K128XDDIbLtcaIM9yghmYNXoYA=='
  },
  'encrypted$addresses': {
    alg: 'AEAD_AES_256_CBC_HMAC_SHA512',
    kid: 'mykey',
    ciphertext: '2T+W+xXVw6TnJJV5fOxpG7WMo26qScROtqc7qjkoSpPrhe4mrCOxfFBFSg8xDzIB/gG+jlWQp8zDWYGIbRVnnoL+sWINdL7Rr7x228fDGjQ4Cu2heqmBkCHueQusuFx1pxo1TLtrUomtqLZB46G3s4WOeg5T4Z9vRfbSwOu9ryf2LVo8rsWf05Vhz5901celbK5L8uX/+HcSULoG2f1C2Qkd5bV/P9ZaO7I9duaUbA0='
  },
  'encrypted$phone': {
    alg: 'AEAD_AES_256_CBC_HMAC_SHA512',
    kid: 'mykey',
    ciphertext: 'M7ao4qp/8t4TKjmHU51xLNSa2h0ydiLfSvzauSfNDfnL/vAxOyYgNsvxMmbX33vMnD6BUe+zGCSo3v8C6fwM7g=='
  }
}

Now let’s decrypt the person document and output the result.

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The output is now:

{
  "firstName": "Barry",
  "lastName": "Sheen",
  "password": "bang!",
  "addresses": [
    {
      "houseName": "my house",
      "street": [
        {
          "firstLine": "my street",
          "secondLine": "my second line"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "houseName": "my other house"
    }
  ],
  "phone": "123456"
}

Migrating from SDK API 2

SDK 2.x reached end-of-life long ago, but should you have fields encrypted by SDK 2.x, and the need to read them from SDK 4.x (or 3.x), then follow the steps in the archived documents.

The encryption algorithms used by SDK 2 are deprecated, and are no longer used for encrypting new data. Do not rely on the security of outdated encryption algorithms.