Imagine you need to design an online system for storing documents on a per-user basis where nobody, including database administrators, would be able to change the content of those documents without being noticed by document owners.

In Percona Server for MySQL 8.0.28-20, we added a new component called Encryption UDFs – an open-source alternative to MySQL Enterprise Encryption that allows users to access a number of low-level OpenSSL encryption primitives directly from MySQL. This includes calculating digests (with a great variety of hash functions), asymmetric key generation (RSA, …

In the last few days, there has been information released about yet another alleged data leak, placing in jeopardy “…[the] personal information on hundreds of millions of American adults, as well as millions of businesses.” In this case, the “victim” was Exactis, for whom data collection and data security are core business functions.

Some takeaways from Exactis

Please excuse the pun! In security, we have few chances to chuckle. In fact, as a Security Architect, I sigh deeply when I read about this kind of issue. Firstly, it’s preventable. Secondly, I worry that if an organization like Exactis is not getting it right, what chance the rest of the world?

As the Wired article notes the tool https://shodan.io/ can be revealing and well worth a look. For example, you …