IBM Power Ideas Portal


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against IBM Power Systems products, including IBM i. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas

  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Add a new idea Subscribe
Status Future consideration
Workspace IBM i
Categories Db2 for i
Created by Guest
Created on Dec 1, 2023

RELATED IDEAS

Provide FIELDPROC_ENCODED_COMPARISON QAQQINI function at column level

DB2 for i Field Procedures are primarily used for column level encryption. The defacto standard for encryption is AES. Ideally, encryption should not be deterministic. In other words, encrypting the same plain text multiple times should produce different results each time with each distinct cipher text value still decrypting to the same plain text value. However, the FIELDPROC_ENCODED_COMPARISON setting is typically set to *ALLOW_EQUAL, so that indexed field equal lookups perform well, avoiding a table scan by allowing the lookup key to be encrypted and the cipher text used as the lookup key. The setting is scoped at best to a Job level, which does not allow different encrypted columns to have different settings. Ideally, a 'lookup' column would like to use *ALLOW_EQUAL to lean toward the performance side of the trade off, but other fields (like an encrypted BLOB medical image) would benefit from *NONE allowing the field procedure to have a non-deterministic encryption for the field.

Please enhance the field proc option 8 processing to allow specification of the FIELDPROC_ENCODED_COMPARISON attribute on a per field basis.

Idea priority Medium
  • Admin
    Carmelita Ruvalcaba Cevallos
    Reply
    |     Mar 26, 2024

    The CAAC has reviewed this IBM Idea and recommends that IBM view this as a high priority Idea that is important to be addressed.

    Securing the system in this day and age is a high priority.

    Background: The COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) members have a broad range of experience in working with small and medium-sized IBM i customers. CAAC has a key role in working with IBM i development to help assess the value and impact of individual IBM Ideas on the broader IBM i community and has therefore reviewed your Idea.

    For more information about CAAC, see www.common.org/caac

    Carmelita Ruvalcaba - CAAC Program Manager

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Dec 20, 2023

    The core of the suggested change is not what it says in the title, it is to remove determinism from field procs. This is to allow something like salting or counter-mode AES.


    However, changing field procs to be non-deterministic is likely to have a very noticeable impact on performance of *retrieving* encrypted data, because determinism allows the quick lookup that is described in the text, and impact on *modifying or inserting* encrypted data, because Db2 cannot use caching of values previously encrypted.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Dec 14, 2023
    IBM will use this Idea as input to planning, but no commitment is made or implied. This Idea will be updated in the future if IBM implements it.

By clicking the "Post Comment" or "Submit Idea" button, you are agreeing to the IBM Ideas Portal Terms of Use.
Do not place IBM confidential, company confidential, or personal information into any field.