How to search cloak AES encrypted format data in Elixir and Postgresql DB

Questions / Help
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1

How to search cloak AES encrypted format data in Elixir and Postgresql DB.

2

What do you mean by “search” exactly?

3

You cannot search encrypted data without decrypting it first.

4

The way we addressed it is by having two columns for the same piece of data: one is the encrypted value, the other one is a hash of the value:

defmodule MyApp.Encrypted.Binary do
  use Cloak.Ecto.Binary, vault: MyApp.Vault
end


defmodule SomeEntity do
  schema "some_table" do
    field :some_field, MyApp.Encrypted.Binary, redact: true
    field :some_field_hash, Cloak.Ecto.SHA256, redact: true
  end
end

and then rely on the fact that casting the field will hash it:

from(e in SomeEntity, where: e.some_field_hash == ^some_value) |> Repo.all()

The hash is computed in the app so the filtering can be done in the DB.

3 Likes
5

It will allow only probabilistic equality checks, not searching for data in encrypted fields.

6

Yes, but then you can double check the narrow set of results in-memory.

7

I want to search records where match field is in cloak encrypted format.