Encrypted documents

Question

We have a need for files that are uploaded by the user to be encrypted "at rest" to prevent system administrators from accessing those documents. Does anyone have experience with this? We are interested in any options, disk encryption, plugins, calls to command line tools. In particular we're interested in a) how, and b) how were the keys stored. 
 Thanks

naveenp878 · Accepted Answer

Hi Richard, 
 
I am afraid we cannot directly do this with in Appian document managment system and all the documents present in Appian will be browsed and viewed by system administrator. 
 
But there is work aorund you can think. Instead of Appian document system, we can store the encrypted document in database. There is an Appian plugin "Base64 Document Database Integration" (Smart services) available here - community.appian.com/.../base64-document-database-integration 
 
This particular plugin can encrypt the document into Base 64 and store the document in database. Also stored document can be retrieved when its needed and ofcourse this document cannot be viewed by system administrator directly instead he has to use only Appian process via this plugin to retrive the document into Appian. 
 
Hope this solution helps. 
 
Thanks - Naveen

Eliot Gerson · Answer

Full disk encryption is a standard approach to ensuring that data is encrypted at rest. Encryption at that level will be transparent to most applications running on the system (including Appian), so any common encryption solution should work. 
 
(Though it's always a good idea to test whatever option you go with, keeping an eye on performance. You should also make sure that your backups will be encrypted to your satisfaction, but still able to be decrypted in the event that they need to be used.)

aloks0189 · Answer

Hi @Richard Nolan I agreed with Eliot Gerson and I wouldn't recommend you to neither use Bade64 conversion nor storing the documents into db. 
 
Reasons: 
1. When you convert a document into Base64, it's generated file size will be much bigger than its actual one. Also this entire conversion output will be stored in memory which causes lot of performance issues. 
 
2. When you are trying to store the document into db, then the conversion procedure takes huge amount of time, and being an end user I would like to receive the documents with no delay unless size is pretty huge, or it needs to get transferred through some third party systems j to Appian KC. Also when you store the documents into db, this increases the db volume and you may come across through lot many performance issue with respect to DB also while dumping this data from one environment to another will be a challenging one.