Use Automatic Queryable Encryption with AWS
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Overview
This guide shows you how to build an application that implements the MongoDB Queryable Encryption feature to automatically encrypt and decrypt document fields and use Amazon Web Services (AWS) KMS for key management.
After you complete the steps in this guide, you should have:
A Customer Master Key managed by AWS KMS
An AWS IAM user with permissions to access the Customer Master Key in AWS KMS
A working client application that inserts documents with encrypted fields using your Customer Master Key
Tip
Customer Master Keys
To learn more about the Customer Master Key, read the Keys and Key Vaults documentation.
Before You Get Started
To complete and run the code in this guide, you need to set up your development environment as shown in the Installation Requirements page.
Tip
See: Full Application
To see the complete code for this sample application,
select the tab corresponding to your programming language and follow
the provided link. Each sample application repository includes a
README.md
file that you can use to learn how to set up your environment
and run the application.
Set Up the KMS
Create the Customer Master Key
Log in to your AWS Management Console.
Navigate to the AWS KMS Console.
Create your Customer Master Key
Create a new symmetric key by following the official AWS documentation on Creating symmetric KMS keys. The key you create is your Customer Master Key. Choose a name and description that helps you identify it; these fields do not affect the functionality or configuration of your CMK.
In the Usage Permissions step of the key generation process, apply the following default key policy that enables Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to grant access to your Customer Master Key:
{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Sid": "Enable IAM User Permissions", "Effect": "Allow", "Principal": { "AWS": "<ARN of your AWS account principal>" }, "Action": "kms:*", "Resource": "*" } ] }
Important
Record the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) and Region of your Customer Master Key. You will use these in later steps of this guide.
Tip
Key Policies
To learn more about key policies, see Key Policies in AWS KMS in the official AWS documentation.
Create an AWS IAM User
Navigate to the AWS IAM Console.
Create an IAM User
Create a new programmatic IAM user in the AWS management console by following the official AWS documentation on Adding a User. You will use this IAM user as a service account for your Queryable Encryption-enabled application. Your application authenticates with AWS KMS using the IAM user to encrypt and decrypt your Data Encryption Keys (DEKs) with your Customer Master Key (CMK).
Important
Record your Credentials
Ensure you record the following IAM credentials in the final step of creating your IAM user:
access key ID
secret access key
You have one opportunity to record these credentials. If you do not record these credentials during this step, you must create another IAM user.
Grant Permissions
Grant your IAM user kms:Encrypt
and kms:Decrypt
permissions for
your remote master key.
Important
The new client IAM user should not have administrative permissions for the master key. To keep your data secure, follow the principle of least privilege.
The following inline policy allows an IAM user to encrypt and decrypt with the Customer Master Key with the least privileges possible:
Note
Remote Master Key ARN
The following policy requires the ARN of the key you generate in the Create the Master Key step of this guide.
{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": ["kms:Decrypt", "kms:Encrypt"], "Resource": "<the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of your remote master key>" } ] }
To apply the preceding policy to your IAM user, follow the Adding IAM identity permissions guide in the AWS documentation.
Important
Authenticate with IAM Roles in Production
When deploying your Queryable Encryption-enabled application to a production environment, authenticate your application by using an IAM role instead of an IAM user.
To learn more about IAM roles, see the following pages in the official AWS documentation:
Create the Application
Assign Your Application Variables
The code samples in this tutorial use the following variables to perform the Queryable Encryption workflow:
Important
Key Vault Collection Namespace Permissions
The Key Vault collection is in the encryption.__keyVault
namespace. Ensure that the database user your application uses to connect
to MongoDB has ReadWrite
permissions on this namespace.
Create your Encrypted Collection
Add Your AWS KMS Credentials
Create a variable containing your AWS KMS credentials with the following structure. Use the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key you created in the Create an IAM User step of this tutorial.
Important
Reminder: Authenticate with IAM Roles in Production
To use an IAM role instead of an IAM user to authenticate your application, specify an empty object for your credentials in your KMS provider object. This instructs the driver to automatically retrieve the credentials from the environment:
Add your Customer Master Key Credentials
Create a variable containing your Customer Master Key credentials with the following structure. Use the ARN and Region you recorded in the Create a Customer Master Key step of this tutorial.
Set Your Automatic Encryption Options
Note
Automatic Encryption Options
The automatic encryption options provide configuration information to the Automatic Encryption Shared Library, which modifies the application's behavior when accessing encrypted fields.
To learn more about the Automatic Encryption Shared Library, see the Automatic Encryption Shared Library for Queryable Encryption page.
Specify Fields to Encrypt
To encrypt a field, add it to the encryption schema. To enable queries on a field, add the "queries" property. Create the encryption schema as follows:
Note
In the previous code sample, both the "ssn" and "billing" fields are encrypted, but only the "ssn" field can be queried.
Query on an Encrypted Field
The following code sample executes a find query on an encrypted field and prints the decrypted data:
The output of the preceding code sample should look similar to the following:
{ "_id": { "$oid": "648b384a722cb9b8392df76a" }, "name": "Jon Doe", "record": { "ssn": "987-65-4320", "billing": { "type": "Visa", "number": "4111111111111111" } }, "__safeContent__": [ { "$binary": { "base64": "L1NsYItk0Sg+oL66DBj6IYHbX7tveANQyrU2cvMzD9Y=", "subType": "00" } } ] }
Warning
Do not Modify the __safeContent__ Field
The __safeContent__
field is essential to Queryable Encryption. Do not modify
the contents of this field.
Learn More
To learn how Queryable Encryption works, see Fundamentals.
To learn more about the topics mentioned in this guide, see the following links:
Learn more about Queryable Encryption components on the Reference page.
Learn how Customer Master Keys and Data Encryption Keys work on the Keys and Key Vaults page.
See how KMS Providers manage your Queryable Encryption keys on the KMS Providers page.