[aerogear-dev] Should encrypted store fail to open when passphrase is wrong?

[Tadeas Kriz]

—
Tadeas Kriz
tkriz at redhat.com

On 21 Jan 2014, at 15:26, Bruno Oliveira <bruno at abstractj.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> --  
> abstractj
> 
> On January 21, 2014 at 12:18:34 PM, Tadeas Kriz (tkriz at redhat.com) wrote:
>>> You can’t compare EncryptedSQLStore with SQLCipher. Completely
> 
> Keep in mind that I never did that ;)

Then I had to misunderstood the "APIs like SQLCipher don’t do that.”, sorry about that.

>> different way of encryption. SQLCipher encrypts the database  
>> page by page (mostly chunks of 1024 bytes), but EncryptedSQLStore  
>> encrypts only the data row by row individually (check [1] for  
>> very simple comparsion). That’s completely different approach.  
>> This way you can find out if the passphrase is right by calling  
>> basically any SQL command and an exception will be thrown if it  
>> won’t succeed. That’s something that cannot be achieved with  
>> current EncryptedSQLStore implementation. The EncryptedSQLStore  
>> already saves IV and Salt in separate table. It wouldn’t be a problem,  
>> performance issue or space issue to add one more row, which the  
>> EncryptedSQLStore would try to decrypt and if successful, that’d  
>> mean the passphrase is correct. The value of that row might be  
>> just an encrypted JSON with random key and value. That way, you’d  
>> check if the decrypted is valid JSON. There should be no security  
>> issue with that, or is there?
> 
> I never mentioned “security issue” in any kind of e-mail or Jira.

Then why would it be a problem?