Server-Side Encryption with Customer-Managed Keys (SSE-C) on WEkEO Elasticity

Introduction

This guide explains how to encrypt your objects server-side with SSE-C.

Server-side encryption is a way to protecting data at rest. SSE encrypts only the object data. Using server-side encryption with customer-provided encryption keys (SSE-C) allows to set your own keys for encryption. Server manages the encryption as it writes to disks and decryption when you access your objects. The only thing that you must manage is to provide your own encryption keys.

SSE-C is working as on the moment of uploading an object. Server uses the encryption key you provide to apply AES-256 encryption to data and removes the encryption key from memory. To access the data again you must provide the same encryption key on the request. Server verifies whether provided key matches and then decrypts the object before returning the object data to you.

Requirements

A bucket (How to use Object Storage on WEkEO Elasticity)
A user with the required access rights on the bucket

EC2 credentials (How to generate and manage EC2 credentials on WEkEO Elasticity)
Have installed and configured aws

If you have not used aws before:

$ sudo apt install awscli

Then:

$ aws configure

AWS Access Key ID [None]: <your EC2 Access Key>
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: <your EC2 Secret Key>
Default region name [None]: <enter>
Default output format [None]: <enter>

SSE-C at a glance

Only HTTPS S3 rejects any requests made over HTTP using SSE-C.

If you send request erroneously using HTTP, for security you should discard the key and rotate as appropriate.

The ETag in the response is not the MD5 of the object data.

You are responsible for managing encryption keys and to which object they were used.

If bucket is versioning-enabled, each object version can have its own encryption key.

Attention

If you lose encryption key it means the object is also lost. Our servers do not store encryption keys, so it is not possible to access the data again without them.

REST API

To encrypt or decrypt objects in SSE-C mode the following headers are required:

Header	Type	Description
x-amz-server-side-encryption-customer-algorithm	string	Encryption algorithm. Must be set to AES256
x-amz-server-side-encryption-customer-key	string	256-bit base64-encoded encryption key used in the server-side encryption process
x-amz-server-side-encryption-customer-key-MD5	string	base64-encoded 128-bit MD5 digest of the encryption key according to RFC 1321. It is used to ensure that the encryption has not been corrupted during transport and encoding process.

Note

MD5 digest of the key before base64 encoding.

Headers apply to the following API operations:

PutObject

PostObject

CopyObject (to target objects)

HeadObject

GetObject

InitiateMultipartUpload

UploadPart

UploadPart-Copy (to target parts)

Example No 1 Generate header values

secret="32bytesOfTotallyRandomCharacters"
key=$(echo -n $secret | base64)
keymd5=$(echo -n $secret | openssl dgst -md5 -binary | base64)

OR

openssl rand 32 > sse-c.key
key=$(cat sse-c.key | base64)
keymd5=$(cat sse-c.key | openssl dgst -md5 -binary | base64)

Example No 2 aws-cli (s3api)

Upload an object with SSE-C encryption enabled

aws s3api put-object \
  --bucket bucket-name --key object-name \
  --body contents.txt \
  --sse-customer-algorithm AES256 \
  --sse-customer-key $key \
  --sse-customer-key-md5 $keymd5 \
  --endpoint-url https://s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com

Example No 3 aws-cli (s3)

aws s3 cp file.txt s3://bucket-name/ \
  --sse-c-key $secret \
  --sse-c AES256 \
  --endpoint https://s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com

Example No 4 aws-cli (s3 blob)

aws s3 cp file.txt s3://bucket/ \
--sse-c-key fileb://sse-c.key \
--sse-c AES256 \
--endpoint https://s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com

Note

At the moment s3cmd does not support SSE-C encryption.

Downloading the encrypted object

aws s3api get-object <file_name> --bucket <bucket_name> \
 --key <object_key> \
 --sse-customer-key $secret \
 --sse-customer-algorithm AES256 \
 --endpoint https://s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com

or

aws s3api get-object <file_name> --bucket <bucket_name> \
 --key <object_key> \
 --sse-customer-key fileb://<key_name> \
 --sse-customer-algorithm AES256 \
 --endpoint https://s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com