What is the MySQL equivalent of SQL Server 2016 Always Encrypted technology?

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Question

What is the MySQL equivalent of SQL Server 2016 Always Encrypted technology or is there anything similar in MySQL that can act as AE?

asked 2016-12-20 by dwkd


Answer

The Always Encrypted feature provides end-to-end encryption, which encrypts data both in-flight, and at rest. Data is encrypted & decrypted on the client at the driver. Data is encrypted everywhere except for on he client machine. This is one step beyond encryption at rest (which is handled in SQL Server by Transparent Data Encryption).

Other RDBMS products do not have a feature which is quite the same. To do something similar on another RDBMS, you could perform encryption on the client within your application, and then send data in its encrypted format to the database.

Also, with deterministic encryption, SQL Server Always Encrypted allows point lookups, equality joins, grouping, and indexing on encrypted columns, which is often not handled by home-grown encryption.

answered 2016-12-22 by Andy Mallon