[Doc] Potentially confusing encryption documentation

Bug #1401087 reported by Raghavendra D Prabhu
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Percona XtraBackup moved to https://jira.percona.com/projects/PXB
Fix Released
Low
Hrvoje Matijakovic
2.1
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned
2.2
Fix Released
Low
Hrvoje Matijakovic
2.3
Fix Released
Low
Hrvoje Matijakovic

Bug Description

http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/2.1/innobackupex/encrypted_backups_innobackupex.html#encrypted-backups-ibk suggest to

generate a key for aes256-cbc (which expects a 32-byte key) but discard it and use its iv instead.

This may be confusing for users since you don't need enc here (which also does message digest and several rounds over the password, and the Password provided on cli has no connection to iv generated) since a

    < /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c${1:-32};echo;

or

    openssl rand -base64 32

will do.

(Because xtrabackup directly asks for a key rather than derive it from a password using a KDF (which is in itself a bug), it doesn't matter how you get a key, any random 32-char string will do).

summary: - Potentially confusing encryption documentation
+ [Doc] Potentially confusing encryption documentation
Revision history for this message
Alexey Kopytov (akopytov) wrote :

OK, I think the example in the doc is correct. But if it looks ambiguous to someone, let's replace it with something more simple like "openssl rand -base64 32".

Revision history for this message
Hrvoje Matijakovic (hrvojem) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Shahriyar Rzayev (rzayev-sehriyar) wrote :

Percona now uses JIRA for bug reports so this bug report is migrated to: https://jira.percona.com/browse/PXB-929

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