Enabling Encyption on an Unencrypted Alpha

[ibrahim (Ibrahim Jarif)]

@mrjn

This is news to me! My understanding was that you turn on encryption on plain text Badger, and over time it would encrypt the data. How come a bunch of us had that understanding, and wrote about that in the blog post – when @ibrahim you think otherwise? What went wrong here?

I also thought that it is possible but I found out few days ago that it is not. I confirmed this with @balaji (who’s worked on encryption in Badger and the blog) a few days ago and it turns out that we don’t support encrypting unencrypted badger. We don’t have any tests for it. All of us assumed it works. I had even reviewed the encryption blog post but didn’t realize the issue with it. Maybe I should’ve manually tested the feature before accepting that it works.

@Paras

I think, and correct me if I am wrong @ibrahim , that was a use-case but never got implemented in Badger when encryption was introduced.

Yes, the original idea was to support it and we thought the current code does that. I found this issue when I was working on an encryption-related ticket.

@gja

How difficult would it be to get things to work as per the blog post?

Not difficult. The key registry file has to be recreated with the new header. I just create a new branch with the fix GitHub - dgraph-io/badger at ibrahim/encryption-keyregistry . I can clean the code tomorrow and send a PR.