Data at Rest Encryption

Full data at rest encryption in Percona XtraDB Cluster is supported by the Operator since version 1.4.0.

Note

Data at rest means inactive data stored as files, database records, etc.

To implement these features, the Operator uses keyring_vault plugin, which ships with Percona XtraDB Cluster, and utilizes HashiCorp Vault storage for encryption keys.

Installing Vault

The following steps will deploy Vault on Kubernetes with the Helm 3 package manager . Other Vault installation methods should also work, so the instruction placed here is not obligatory and is for illustration purposes. Read more about installation in Vault’s documentation .

1. Add helm repo and install:

   $ helm repo add hashicorp https://helm.releases.hashicorp.com
   "hashicorp" has been added to your repositories
   
   $ helm install vault hashicorp/vault
   

2. After the installation, Vault should be first initialized and then unsealed. Initializing Vault is done with the following commands:

   $ kubectl exec -it pod/vault-0 -- vault operator init -key-shares=1 -key-threshold=1 -format=json > /tmp/vault-init
   $ unsealKey=$(jq -r ".unseal_keys_b64[]" < /tmp/vault-init)
   

   To unseal Vault, execute the following command for each Pod of Vault running:

   $ kubectl exec -it pod/vault-0 -- vault operator unseal "$unsealKey"
   

Configuring Vault

1. First, you should enable secrets within Vault. For this you will need a Vault token . Percona XtraDB Cluster can use any regular token which allows all operations inside the secrets mount point. In the following example we are using the root token to be sure the permissions requirement is met, but actually there is no need in root permissions. We don’t recommend using the root token on the production system.

   $ cat /tmp/vault-init | jq -r ".root_token"
   

   The output will be like follows:

   s.VgQvaXl8xGFO1RUxAPbPbsfN
   

   Now login to Vault with this token and enable the “pxc-secret” secrets path:

   $ kubectl exec -it vault-0 -- /bin/sh
   $ vault login s.VgQvaXl8xGFO1RUxAPbPbsfN
   $ vault secrets enable --version=1 -path=pxc-secret kv
   

   Note

   You can also enable audit, which is not mandatory, but useful:

   $ vault audit enable file file_path=/vault/vault-audit.log
   

2. To enable Vault secret within Kubernetes, create and apply the YAML file, as described further.

   1. To access the Vault server via HTTP, follow the next YAML file example:

      apiVersion: v1
      kind: Secret
      metadata:
        name: some-name-vault
      type: Opaque
      stringData:
        keyring_vault.conf: |-
           token = s.VgQvaXl8xGFO1RUxAPbPbsfN
           vault_url = http://vault-service.vault-service.svc.cluster.local:8200
           secret_mount_point = pxc-secret
      

      Note

      the name key in the above file should be equal to the spec.vaultSecretName key from the deploy/cr.yaml configuration file.

   2. To turn on TLS and access the Vault server via HTTPS, you should do two more things:

      • add one more item to the secret: the contents of the ca.cert file with your certificate,

      • store the path to this file in the vault_ca key.

      apiVersion: v1
      kind: Secret
      metadata:
        name: some-name-vault
      type: Opaque
      stringData:
        keyring_vault.conf: |-
          token = = s.VgQvaXl8xGFO1RUxAPbPbsfN
          vault_url = https://vault-service.vault-service.svc.cluster.local:8200
          secret_mount_point = pxc-secret
          vault_ca = /etc/mysql/vault-keyring-secret/ca.cert
        ca.cert: |-
          -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
          MIIEczCCA1ugAwIBAgIBADANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQQFAD..AkGA1UEBhMCR0Ix
          EzARBgNVBAgTClNvbWUtU3RhdGUxFDASBgNVBAoTC0..0EgTHRkMTcwNQYD
          7vQMfXdGsRrXNGRGnX+vWDZ3/zWI0joDtCkNnqEpVn..HoX
          -----END CERTIFICATE-----
      

      Note

      the name key in the above file should be equal to the spec.vaultSecretName key from the deploy/cr.yaml configuration file.

      Note

      For techincal reasons the vault_ca key should either exist or not exist in the YAML file; commented option like #vault_ca = ... is not acceptable.

More details on how to install and configure Vault can be found in the official documentation .

Using the encryption

If using Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7, you should turn encryption on explicitly when you create a table or a tablespace. This can be done by adding the ENCRYPTION='Y' part to your SQL statement, like in the following example:

CREATE TABLE t1 (c1 INT, PRIMARY KEY pk(c1)) ENCRYPTION='Y';
CREATE TABLESPACE foo ADD DATAFILE 'foo.ibd' ENCRYPTION='Y';

Note

See more details on encryption in Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7 here .

If using Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0, the encryption is turned on by default (in case if Vault is configured).

The following table presents the default values of the correspondent my.cnf configuration options :

Option	Default value
early-plugin-load	keyring_vault.so
keyring_vault_config	/etc/mysql/vault-keyring-secret/keyring_vault.conf
default_table_encryption	ON
table_encryption_privilege_check	ON
innodb_undo_log_encrypt	ON
innodb_redo_log_encrypt	ON
binlog_encryption	ON
binlog_rotate_encryption_master_key_at_startup	ON
innodb_temp_tablespace_encrypt	ON
innodb_parallel_dblwr_encrypt	ON
innodb_encrypt_online_alter_logs	ON
encrypt_tmp_files	ON

---

Last update: 2025-04-15