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I have a ASP.net C# Cloud application and I need to encrypt my SQL Azure Tables. I have researched about this and I found out that SQL Azure doesn't support encryption and that you have to do it in the application layer.

Now I have no problem encrypting my stored procedure parameters and decrypting them again when i read out, however this means I cannot perform a proper search on my cells anymore.

I have no idea how to deal with this except reading the whole thing in memory and filtering it there, but that just feels dirty and I don't wanna lose performance once I start reading a lot of cells.

Do you guys have any idea how to cope with this??

Thanks a lot

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  • "I need to encrypt my SQL Azure Tables" are you sure this doesn't amount to security by obscurity? Does it really afford any more protection? After all, your app still need to access the decrypted data... Commented Feb 20, 2014 at 13:03
  • I agree with spender. You are basically hiding it from the guys who work in the Azure data centre. If anyone else can connect to the database they will be able to query the encrypted data like your app does. Commented Feb 20, 2014 at 23:40

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The only realistic way to have encryption-at-rest in SQL Server in Azure is to provision an IaaS VM with full SQL Server installed, as described here. Then you can configure whatever full-blown SQL features you want, including encryption, full-text indexing and all the other stuff that's not available in Windows Azure SQL Database.

But as @spender says, is encryption really necessary in this instance? The encryption-at-rest feature is to protect sensitive data in the event of the physical disk being compromised, and that's not really going to happen in a massive-scale cloud hosting scenario.

Update: full-text search and TDE are now supported in SQL Azure http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/30/full-text-search-is-now-available-for-preview-in-azure-sql-database/

http://www.sqlindepth.com/full-text-search-in-sql-azure/

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlsecurity/archive/2015/04/29/announcing-transparent-data-encryption-for-azure-sql-database.aspx

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In case anyone else stumbles on this question, note that Azure SQL Database now supports Transparent Data Encryption (TDE, aka "encryption-at-rest").

See: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn948096.aspx

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The problem is that this is all very sensitive data. The only way we have done it now is to actually manually encrypt every entry that gets into the database. The only issue with this is that searching this data now because very hard to deal with.

We actually implemented an extra table that contains the first 4 encrypted letters which we then use for our searches. I know it's very farfetched but this was the only way to do it

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