Exercise - Secure your data in transit, at rest, and on display

  • 8 minutes

The marketplaceDb database stores information that is sensitive, such as physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers. If exposed, malicious attackers could use this information to harm your business or your customers. Look at how you can use encryption and data masking to enhance the security of your database.

TLS network encryption

Azure SQL Database enforces Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption always for all connections, which ensures all data is encrypted in transit between the database and the client. By using TLS encryption, you can ensure that anyone who might intercept the traffic between the app server and database wouldn't be able to read the data. TLS encryption is a standard of securing traffic over the internet, and in this case ensures your network traffic to and from your Azure SQL database is secure by default.

Transparent data encryption

Azure SQL Database protects your data at rest using transparent data encryption (TDE). TDE performs real-time encryption and decryption of the database, associated backups, and transaction log files at rest without requiring changes to the application. Transparent data encryption performs real-time I/O encryption and decryption of the data at the page level by using a database encryption key. Each page is decrypted when it's read into memory and then encrypted before being written to disk.

By default, TDE is enabled for all newly deployed Azure SQL databases. It's important to check that data encryption isn't turned off. Older Azure SQL Server databases might not have TDE enabled.

Take a look in the Azure portal at where TDE is configured on your marketplaceDb database.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal using the same account you activated the sandbox with.

  2. In the search bar at the top of the Azure portal, search for marketplaceDb, then select the database.

  3. In the left menu pane, under Security, select Data encryption.

  4. In the data encryption option, verify that Data encryption is set to On. You should also see an encryption status of Encrypted.

Because new databases are encrypted by default, you can be sure that your data is encrypted on disk from as soon as you create the database.

Note

Azure includes a built in service called Microsoft Defender for Cloud that gives you visibility into the security of your environment, including Azure SQL databases. Microsoft Defender for Cloud flags any databases that don't have TDE enabled on them, giving you the ability to report and take action to secure your data.

Dynamic data masking

You might notice that when you ran your query in the previous unit that some of the information in the database is sensitive. There are phone numbers, email addresses, and other information that you might not want to fully display to everyone with access to the data.

Maybe you don't want your users to be able to see the full phone number or email address, but you still want to make a portion of the data available for customer service representatives to identify a customer. By using the dynamic data masking feature of Azure SQL Database, you can limit the data that is displayed to the user. Dynamic data masking is a policy-based security feature that hides the sensitive data in the result set of a query over designated database fields, while the data in the database isn't changed.

Data masking rules consist of the column to apply the mask to, and how the data should be masked. You can create your own masking format, or use one of the standard masks, such as:

  • Default value, which displays the default value for that data type instead.
  • Credit card value, which only shows the last four digits of the number, converting all other numbers to lower case x's.
  • Email, which hides the domain name and all but the first character of the email account name.
  • Number, which specifies a random number between a range of values. For example, on the credit card expiry month and year, you could select random months from 1 to 12 and set the year range from 2018 to 3000.
  • Custom string, which allows you to set the number of characters exposed from the start of the data, the number of characters exposed from the end of the data, and the characters to repeat for the remainder of the data.

When database administrators query the columns, they still see the original values. Nonadministrators see the masked values. You can allow other users to see the nonmasked versions by adding them to the SQL users excluded from masking list.

Take a look at how data masking would work in your marketplaceDb database.

  1. While still in the portal on the marketplaceDb database panel, in the left menu pane, under Security, select Dynamic Data Masking.

    The Masking rules screen shows a list of existing dynamic data masks, and recommendations for columns that should potentially have a dynamic data mask applied.

    Screenshot of the Azure portal showing a list of the recommended masks for the various database columns of a sample database.

  2. Add a mask for the phone number that only displays the last four digits. Select the Add mask button at the top to open the Add masking rule dialog box.

  3. Select the following values.

    Setting Value  
    Schema SalesLT
    Table Customer
    Column Phone (nvarchar)
    Masking field format Custom string (prefix [padding] suffix)
    Exposed Prefix 0
    Padding String XXX-XXX-
    Exposed Suffix 4

  4. Select Add to add the masking rule.

    Screenshot of the Azure portal showing the values to add a masking rule.

  5. Add one more for the email address. Select the Add mask button at the top again to open the Add masking rule dialog box.

    Setting Value  
    Schema SalesLT
    Table Customer
    Column EmailAddress (nvarchar)
    Masking field format Email (aXXX@XXX.com)

  6. Select Add to add the masking rule.

  7. Each new mask is added to the masking rules list. Select Save to apply the masks.

Take a look at how data masking changes your query.

  1. Now sign back in to the database, but as the ApplicationUser user.

    sqlcmd -S tcp:[server-name].database.windows.net,1433 -d marketplaceDb -U 'ApplicationUser' -P '[password]' -N -l 30

  2. Run the following query.

    SELECT FirstName, LastName, EmailAddress, Phone FROM SalesLT.Customer;
GO

    Look at how the output is masked.

    FirstName     LastName      EmailAddress         Phone
------------- ------------- -------------------- ------------
Orlando       Gee           oXXX@XXXX.com        XXX-XXX-0173
Keith         Harris        kXXX@XXXX.com        XXX-XXX-0127
Donna         Carreras      dXXX@XXXX.com        XXX-XXX-0130
Janet         Gates         jXXX@XXXX.com        XXX-XXX-0173
...

With the masking rules you created, your data is masked with format that you specify. These rules allow your customer service reps to verify a customer with the last four digits of their phone number, but hides the full number and the customer's email address from view.