Data Decryption

You might need to decrypt data from an encrypted Dgraph cluster for a variety of reasons, including:

• Migration of data from an encrypted cluster to a non-encrypted cluster
• Changing your data or schema by directly editing an RDF file or schema file

To support these scenarios, Dgraph includes a decrypt command that decrypts encrypted RDF and schema files. To learn how to export RDF and schema files from Dgraph, see: Dgraph Administration: Export database.

The decrypt command supports a variety of symmetric key lengths, which determine the AES cypher used for encryption and decryption, as follows:

The decrypt command also supports the use of Hashicorp Vault to store secrets, including support for Vault’s AppRole authentication.

Decryption options

The following decryption options (or flags) are available for the decrypt command:

To learn more about the --vault superflag and its options that have replaced the --vault_* options in release v20.11 and earlier, see Dgraph CLI Command Reference.

Data decryption examples

For example, you could use the following command with an encrypted RDF file (encrypted.rdf.gz) and an encryption key file (enc_key_file), to create a decrypted RDF file:

# Encryption Key from the file path
dgraph decrypt --file "encrypted.rdf.gz" --out "decrypted_rdf.gz" --encryption key-file="enc-key-file"

# Encryption Key from HashiCorp Vault
dgraph decrypt --file "encrypted.rdf.gz" --out "decrypted_rdf.gz" \
  --vault addr="http://localhost:8200";enc-field="enc_key";enc-format="raw";path="secret/data/dgraph/alpha";role-id-file="./role_id";secret-id-file="./secret_id"

You can use similar syntax to create a decrypted schema file:

# Encryption Key from the file path
dgraph decrypt --file "encrypted.schema.gz" --out "decrypted_schema.gz" --encryption key-file="enc-key-file"

# Encryption Key from HashiCorp Vault
dgraph decrypt --file "encrypted.schema.gz" --out "decrypted_schema.gz" \
  --vault addr="http://localhost:8200";enc-field="enc_key";enc-format="raw";path="secret/data/dgraph/alpha";role-id-file="./role_id";secret-id-file="./secret_id"