Encryption at Rest Guardrails

Overview

Most corporations already have standards around data encryption. These vary from detailed rules that classify data by sensitivity and provide encryption requirements for each, to more general guidelines like "encrypt everything!". Guardrails provides a simple yet flexible platform for the implementation and auditing of these standards, whatever they may be.

Encryption at Rest refers specifically to the encryption of data when written to an underlying storage system. All the major cloud vendors provide options for encryption of the data that they store on your behalf. Often, the details vary by service; within a given cloud provider, the encryption options may be different for their object storage, relational databases, no-sql databases, file servers, etc. While the details may differ, the type of options are generally the same:

• Encryption Level: is it enabled? Is it the correct algorithm/type?
• Key Management: what key should be used?

Guardrails generally solves these with 2 policies:

• Encryption at Rest: This policy allows you check or enforce the minimum or actual level of encryption required for the service. The option values are ordered from least secure to most secure. Note that in these policies, Guardrails considers a customer managed key more secure than a default key managed by the vendor.
• Encryption At Rest > Customer Managed Key: This allows you to specify the key to be used for encryption (assuming you have set the "Encryption at Rest") policy to use a customer managed key.

For services that support changing the encryption level and/or key, Guardrails can enforce your standard and change the encryption on the fly. These policies can be found directly under the service in the hierarchy:

• {Provider} > {Service} > {Resource} > Encryption at Rest
• {Provider} > {Service} > {Resource} > Encryption at Rest > Customer Managed Key

Some services only allow you to set the encryption options when the resource is created. While you may not be able to change the encryption level on the fly in this case, you may want to take some other action such as stopping, detaching, or deleting the resource. Guardrails provides these capabilities in the "Approved" policies:

• {Provider} > {Service} > {Resource} > Approved > Encryption at Rest
• {Provider} > {Service} > {Resource} > Approved > Encryption at Rest > Customer Managed Key

General Guidelines

Most Encryption At Rest policies have options for using a custom key. This will be defined in a sub policy Encryption At Rest > Customer Managed Key

Values

Encryption at Rest value names are consistent where possible, though all of the implementations support different values:

• The term {provider) Managed Key refers to encryption using default keys (Microsoft managed keys, AWS managed keys)
• The term Customer Managed Key refers to non-default keys (customer keys in KMS or KeyVault)
• When using an policy specifies “or higher”, the values list will appear in order from least secure to most secure

Note that policies may not contain all of these possible values depending on the implementation, and there may be other values specific to a service/resource . Most Check policies have a matching Enforce policy. A notable exception is that we don't use Enforce: None or higher as it would never take an action.

# AWS > S3 > Bucket > Encryption at Rest - Skip - "Check: None" - "Check: None or higher" - "Check: AWS SSE" - "Check: AWS SSE or higher" - "Check: AWS managed key" - "Check: AWS managed key or higher" - "Check: Customer managed key" - "Check: Encryption at Rest > Customer Managed Key" - "Enforce: None" - "Enforce: None or higher" - "Enforce: AWS SSE" - "Enforce: AWS SSE or higher" - "Enforce: AWS managed key" - "Enforce: AWS managed key or higher" - "Enforce: Customer managed key" - "Enforce: Encryption at Rest > Customer Managed Key"