A custom Ecto.Type for deriving a key for fields using PBKDF2.

PBKDF2 is more secure than Cloak.Fields.HMAC and Cloak.Fields.SHA256 because it uses key stretching to increase the amount of time to compute hashes. This slows down brute-force attacks.

Why

If you store a hash of a field’s value, you can then query on it as a proxy for an encrypted field. This works because PBKDF2 is deterministic and always results in the same value, while secure encryption does not. Be warned, however, that hashing will expose which fields have the same value, because they will contain the same hash.

Dependency

To use this field type, you must install the :pbkdf2 library in your mix.exs file.

{:pbkdf2, "~> 2.0"}

Configuration

Create a PBKDF2 field in your project:

defmodule MyApp.Hashed.PBKDF2 do
  use Cloak.Fields.PBKDF2, otp_app: :my_app
end

Then, configure it with a :secret, an :algorithm, the maximum :size of the stored key (in bytes), and a number of :iterations, either using mix configuration:

config :my_app, MyApp.Hashed.PBKDF2,
  algorithm: :sha256,
  iterations: 10_000,
  secret: "secret"

Or using the init/1 callback to fetch configuration at runtime:

defmodule MyApp.Hashed.PBKDF2 do
  use Cloak.Fields.PBKDF2, otp_app: :my_app

  @impl Cloak.Fields.PBKDF2
  def init(config) do
    config = Keyword.merge(config, [
      algorithm: :sha256,
      iterations: 10_000,
      secret: System.get_env("PBKDF2_SECRET")
    ])

    {:ok, config}
  end
end

Usage

Create the hash field with the type :binary. Add it to your schema definition like this:

schema "table" do
  field :field_name, MyApp.Encrypted.Binary
  field :field_name_hash, MyApp.Hashed.PBKDF2
end

Ensure that the hash is updated whenever the target field changes with the put_change/3 function:

def changeset(struct, attrs \\ %{}) do
  struct
  |> cast(attrs, [:field_name, :field_name_hash])
  |> put_hashed_fields()
end

defp put_hashed_fields(changeset) do
  changeset
  |> put_change(:field_name_hash, get_field(changeset, :field_name))
end

Query the Repo using the :field_name_hash in any place you would typically query by :field_name.

user = Repo.get_by(User, email_hash: "user@email.com")