We host a database for one of our applications on Microsoft SQL Azure. One of ou

Question

We host a database for one of our applications on Microsoft SQL Azure. One of our clients was dissatisfied with the fact that TDE is not supported on SQL Azure (and the database is otherwise not encrypted at rest). Their concerns were mostly along the following lines:

Data-center employees that have access to the VMs also have access to the database. We should use TDE to make sure that they can't get access to customer data from our database.

My reasoning is that if a data-center employee has administrator login access to the VM that hosts the SQL Server then they automatically gain access to the keys used for TDE. Which defeats the purpose of TDE in that case. The only real benefit to TDE would be for securing backups of the database.

Am I wrong in thinking so? And are there any alternatives to securing the whole database, relatively painlessly?

Explanation / Answer

No, your understanding of TDE is not wrong. A user with the appropriate permissions on the SQL Server instance can access the data in the database, and with SQL Azure, even if TDE were enabled, the DBAs in charge of the instance would certainly still have full access to the data.

What can you do? Well, you can encrypt the data in the application before you ever send it to the database. This creates a whole slew of additional constraints on how you query and use the data however, and is generally only appropriate in very limited use cases.

Ideally, you'd convince the client that this is an acceptable risk. The cloud providers business model is built around protecting their clients' data, not stealing it. It isn't in their best interest to abuse their position of trust in that way.

To me this sounds like its probably a search for a technical solution to a problem that doesn't need solving. I understand the concern, but in my opinion, the concern is out of proportion to the risk.

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