ALE

ALE FAQ

Quick answers to questions that come up repeatedly when discussing Application Level Encryption in general, independent of any particular framework.

• What's an IV, and why does it matter?
• What's a hash, and how is that different from encryption?
• Why do I need to HMAC data to make it searchable?
• Why do I need to HMAC data to enforce a unique constraint?
• What's the difference between key rotation and rekeying?
• Why would a key ever need to rotate?
• Why can there be only one active encryption key at a time, but potentially many active HMAC keys?
• If HMACs don't carry a reference to their own key, how does rekeying know what to rekey?
• What is HMAC tokenization / derived-value search?
• What's a tenant?