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Comment on Launch HN: JumpWire (YC W22) – Easily encrypt customer data in your databases

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Cool product. Just curious, is there no existing encryption at the DB level? I would expect modern DBs to be able to do that.

Thanks! Some databases have encryption support but it is either coarse (row-level encryption is offered in a few databases for example) or it's a low level construct that becomes really complex to integrate - especially if you want to seamlessly decrypt some data. They're often only available in enterprise versions (MongoDB and MySQL do this).

pgcrypto mentioned below is a good example. It's a great extension that works really well, and if you're only using PostgrSQL you could build a lot of the functionality of JumpWire using it. But it requires a lot of engineering work to fit into your application. Having the basic encryption functions only gets you part of the way to a full solution - the rest is aligning those with high level policies and keeping up to date as data schemas change.

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