What encryption mechanism is used in CouchDB?

Question

Does anyone know about what type of encryption is used to store data securely on CouchDB? How one can change/control this encryption mechanism for data security on CouchDB?

Answer 1

CouchDB does not encrypt data at rest (except passwords, by way of a PBKDF2 one-way hash).

It does allow the encryption of data in transit, by use of HTTPS, but for at-rest encryption, your options are:

• Device/filesystem-level encryption. This is handled by your OS, and is completely invisible to CouchDB (and all other apps).
• Application-level encryption. You can have your application encrypt data before marshaling it to JSON for storage in CouchDB. The crypto-pouch plugin is one example of this, which works for PouchDB (Note: I've never used it, so can't vouch for its usefulness).