Question

We are going to store some sensitive information about our customers in the db model res_partners.

However we don’t want to store this information in a simple text field. We would prefer
some basic encrypting if possible for those fields. We do not want someone who
has access to the db to have access to these fields.

Is there a way we can get this done in openerp or postgres ?

Thank you,
Vishal Khialani

Answer 1

There is no such thing as “basic” encryption. Rot13 is not getting to get you anywhere here. If your data is sensitive enough to deserve protection, then you need to use state of the art cyphers such as Blowfish. I advise you give a good long look at Bruce Schneier’s book Applied Cryptography

The easy (and insecure) way to achieve this is to overload the write and read methods of your model to encrypt before writing and decrypt after reading.

The tricky part is storing the encryption key. You could store it in a file on the computer running the OpenERP server (assuming the database is running on another server). This is still pretty weak, as the key will be available in clear on the server, but could still be useful if you don’t trust your database server admin, but do trust you openerp server admin. It’s still way easier to get the database server in a secure and trusted place, and if required to crypt offline copies of the database (such as backups).

If you want more security, you’ll have to send the data encrypted to the client application, and let the decryption happen there, using a user-supplied key. I’m not enough knowledgeable of this part of openerp to say if it is easily feasible or not.