Your Porticor appliance can encrypt data being stored to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Porticor is the only system available that offers the convenience of cloud-based hosted key management without sacrificing trust by requiring someone else to manage the keys. Porticor’s split-key encryption technology protects keys and guarantees they remain under customer control and are never exposed in storage; and with homomorphic key encryption, the keys are protected – even while they are in use.

A variety of applications use S3 to store bulk data, and we support two different ways of enabling Porticor encryption with them.

1. The first and recommended alternative is to configure the application so that data is written to and read from the Porticor appliance.
2. Where this is not an option, you can instead configure host-to-IP mapping so that the application writing to s3.amazonaws.com actually writes to the appliance, which encrypts and forwards the data to S3.

These are two options to set up your environment, but the end result is one and the same: your data is encrypted when written to S3 and decrypted when reading from it, with no need to change the client application.

What follows are detailed instructions for both configuration options.

Alternative 1: Explicit Configuration

This alternative depends on the individual application. In fact some S3 clients are hardwired to the Amazon server addresses and cannot be configured. For these clients you must use Alternative 2.

In this alternative you configure the S3 client to connect to a special DNS address for each of your buckets and for the main S3 endpoint. These DNS addresses are installed automatically when you add your S3 “buckets” into the table on the S3 Encryption page. All buckets that are to be encrypted must be listed. If your bucket is called mylittlebucket, it will be mapped to the DNS name mylittlebucket.d.porticor.net.

The specific client configuration depends on the particular client. Following are two examples.

Configuring s3cmd

Edit the file $HOME/.s3cfg, and replace the host_base and host_bucket lines as below, where the long host_base value is your appliance’s address.

# old:
# host_base = s3.amazonaws.com
# host_bucket = %(bucket)s.s3.amazonaws.com

# new:
host_base = itbetb19zy3-pzjy3yty2zw.d.porticor.net
host_bucket = %(bucket)s.d.porticor.net

Configuring S3QL

Edit $HOME/.s3ql/authinfo2, and add a new section:

[porticor]
storage-url: s3c://itbetb19zy3-pzjy3yty2zw.d.porticor.net/bucket-name/
backend-login: aws-key-id
backend-password: aws-secret-key

To create the file system, run:

mkfs.s3ql --plain --ssl s3://bucket-name/

mount.s3ql --ssl s3://bucket-name /mnt/cloud-drive

Note the use of the “s3c” URL method. Both the --ssl and --plain flags are mandatory.

Alternative 2: Host Mapping

With this alternative you configure the host on which your S3 client is running, so that s3.amazonaws.com and bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com are resolved to the IP address of the Porticor appliance. You should not fill in the Bucket table in this alternative.
On Linux, edit the file /etc/hosts and add the lines shown below.
On Windows, add these lines to %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\lmhosts (or ...\hosts, depending on your Windows version).

Appliance-IP bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com # replicate this line for each S3 bucket
Appliance-IP s3.amazonaws.com

Use the so-called “private” IP address (10.x.x.x) of the Porticor appliance, for access from within the EC2 cloud. If you plan to access the appliance from outside the cloud or even from another AWS region you will need to use “public” address instead. Both addresses are listed in the S3 Configuration GUI page.
All communication with the virtual appliance is SSL-protected. In Alternative 2, you should make sure that your project’s CA certificate is installed on the client machine, otherwise your S3 client might refuse to connect.

Additional Notes

• You need to wait a few minutes after the creation of a new bucket before starting to use it, so that it is recognized by all S3 servers.
• Note that Porticor does not support “mixed buckets” containing both protected and unprotected objects.
• Bucket names must conform with the requirements for DNS names, as recommended by Amazon Web Services. In particular they must not contain uppercase letters.

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