AWS News Blog

Data Encryption Made Easier – New Encryption Options for Amazon RDS

Encryption of stored data (often referred to as “data at rest”) is an important part of any data protection plan. Today we are making it easier for you to encrypt data at rest in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database instances running MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle Database.

Before today’s release you had the following options for encryption of data at rest:

  • RDS for Oracle Database – AWS-managed keys for Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE).
  • RDS for SQL Server – AWS-managed keys for SQL Server Enterprise Edition (EE).

In addition to these options, we are adding the following options to your repertoire:

For all of the database engines and key management options listed above, encryption (AES-256) and decryption are applied automatically and transparently to RDS storage and to database snapshots. You don’t need to make any changes to your code or to your operating model in order to benefit from this important data protection feature.

Let’s take a closer look at all three of these options!

Customer-Managed Keys for MySQL and PostgreSQL
We launched the AWS Key Management Service last year at AWS re:Invent. As I noted at the time, KMS provides you with seamless, centralized control over your encryption keys.  It was designed to help you to implement key management at enterprise scale with facility to create and rotate keys, establish usage policies, and to perform audits on key usage (visit the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) home page for more information).

You can enable this feature and start to use customer-managed keys for your RDS database instances running MySQL or PostgreSQL with a couple of clicks when you create a new database instance. Turn on Enable Encryption and choose the default (AWS-managed) key or create your own using KMS and select it from the dropdown menu:

That’s all it takes to start using customer-managed encryption for your MySQL or PostgreSQL database instances. To learn more, read the documentation on Encrypting RDS Resources.

Customer-Managed Keys for Oracle Database
AWS CloudHSM is a service that helps you to meet stringent compliance requirements for cryptographic operations and storage of encryption keys by using single tenant Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS cloud.

CloudHSM is now integrated with Amazon RDS for Oracle Database. This allows you to maintain sole and exclusive control of the encryption keys in CloudHSM instances when encrypting RDS database instances using Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE).

You can use the new CloudHSM CLI tools to configure groups of HSM appliances in order to ensure that RDS and other applications that use CloudHSM keep running as long as one HSM in the group is available. For example, the CLI tools allow you to clone keys from one HSM to another.

To learn how to use Oracle TDE in conjunction with a CloudHSM, please read our new guide to Using AWS CloudHSM with Amazon RDS.

Available Now
These features are available now and you can start using them today!

— Jeff;