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Column-Level Encryption

Enterprise-grade security for sensitive data with granular column-level encryption.

Overview

HeliosDB's Column-Level Encryption provides: - Selective encryption of PII, financial, and sensitive data - GDPR/HIPAA/PCI-DSS compliance support - Transparent encryption/decryption (zero code changes) - Multiple encryption algorithms (AES-256-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305) - Format-Preserving Encryption (FPE)

Quick Start

-- Enable encryption on a column
ALTER TABLE customers
  ALTER COLUMN ssn SET ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM 'AES-256-GCM';

-- Insert data (automatically encrypted)
INSERT INTO customers (name, ssn) VALUES ('John Doe', '123-45-6789');

-- Query data (automatically decrypted)
SELECT name, ssn FROM customers WHERE id = 1;

Key Features

Feature Description
AES-256-GCM Default, hardware-accelerated, FIPS 140-2 compliant
ChaCha20-Poly1305 Software-optimized for non-AES-NI platforms
Format-Preserving Maintains data format (SSN, CC, phone, email)
Key Rotation Zero-downtime rotation without re-encryption
KMS Integration AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, GCP Cloud KMS

Performance

  • Less than 5% overhead vs. unencrypted operations
  • Multi-level caching (L1 memory, L2 with TTL, key cache)
  • Batch processing for parallel encryption
  • Hardware AES-NI acceleration

Documentation

Document Description
COLUMN_LEVEL_ENCRYPTION.md Complete implementation guide
COLUMN_ENCRYPTION_QUICK_START.md Getting started guide
  • Security Quick Start: /docs/quick-starts/features/SECURITY_QUICK_START.md
  • Security Hardening: /docs/guides/user/SECURITY_HARDENING_V7.md

Status: Production Ready Version: v7.0