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The main new features of Acra 0.84.0 are based around the DevOps’ needs – they eliminate the need to have a deep knowledge of secure development and cryptography to protect your data using Acra. Logs, metrics, and full-scale tracing will help during the deployment and usage of Acra. You can export them to your favourite tools (i.e. ELK, Prometheus, Jaeger) and monitor Acra’s load, performance, and behaviour, in real-time. Great things are planned for the next few releases.

As the days were getting shorter, our pull requests were getting longer, and here we are now, proud to present Acra 0.83.0. Its distinctive new feature is the AcraRotate utility, which allows you easily rotate the storage keys on a regular basis or perform an emergency key rotation if you’ve detected (or suspect) a compromise of the client app. SQL filtering got more flexible — the new 6 patterns (including SUBQUERY and LIST_OF_VALUES) allow deep customisation for configuring the accepted queries and blocking malicious requests.

A methodical software developer’s perspective on mapping privacy regulations to changes in the database structure, updates in DevOps practices, backups, and restricted processing. GDPR and software development After 2 years of fearful anticipation, GDPR is finally here, in full effect starting with May 25, 2018. A considerable number of clients who've entrusted their data to our solutions keep asking a lot of questions in one or another way related to GDPR.

Poison Records in Acra Intro When naming our special type of data containers created for raising an alarm within Acra-powered infrastructures, we were sure we’ve seen the term “poison records” used elsewhere in the same context. This particular technique in out of the box solution was first offered by us (if it wasn’t, let us know! We'd like to know more about their backstory :)). In a way, poison records are very much like passive honeypots, but their mechanics of work is completely different.

Summer moves on, Acra improves. This corridor of eclipses and Mercury retrograde gave life to the new version of Acra. Whole lotta updates to the already existing infrastructural elements. What else is new? AcraTranslator, for that matter — a lightweight server that receives AcraStructs stored anywhere and returns the decrypted data. Previously Acra was closely tied to the database infrastructure, but AcraTranslator is a tool that allows storing AcraStructs wherever it is convenient — as cells in a database or as files in a file storage (local or cloud storage, like AWS S3).

Late April throughout late June of 2018 was quite a hot time for the Cossack Labs team as we were actively developing our products, releasing feature after feature for Acra and Themis and also participated, spoken at, and hosted a number of conferences, meetups, and workshops. Want to see what it takes for an R&D team to actively participate in a conference circuit? Read on. 21/04 BSides Kyiv, Ukraine The BSides Kyiv security conference kicked off the series of social events for Cossack Labs in this quarter.

ACRA 0.81.0 RELEASE All the terrible things like lunar and solar eclipses, Mercury retrogrades, and PHP code refactoring will come later — this Friday is fully dedicated to the new release of Acra. In Acra 0.81.0 we’ve concentrated our efforts on improving the overall SQL handling, especially when it comes to SQL injection prevention, and teaching Acra’s “firewall” AcraCensor a few new tricks. If you’ve had troubles integrating some 3rd party WAFs into your infrastructure, Acra now might offer you a simpler, trouble-free solution.

ACRA 0.80.0 RELEASE This release is dedicated to usability and unification. Many components of Acra have been renamed. We believe that the updated names will decrease confusion about the components' functions and will make Acra's setup and usage process easier. The new names also align better with the common package naming practices. We couldn’t find a day inauspicious enough to release Acra 0.80.0, but decided that that last day of spring is still quite special :) Here are the changes in the new release:

Need for Docker image reducing To provide convenient delivery and faster deployment of our tools, just like everybody else − we use Docker. This article describes our experience of using containers for distribution of our product Acra (database encryption suite) and focuses on the method we used to reduce the size of Docker images approximately by 62-64 times. It’s not like we’ve made a revolutionary discovery, but as developers, we found it interesting to trace the steps from the moment of packaging a product into a container to trimming it down to a small Docker image.

ACRA 0.77.0 RELEASE Sticking to our tradition of rolling out new releases on conspicuous dates, we’re presenting Acra 0.77.0 on Friday 13th, Mercury retrograde. The changelog for the new Acra release was 3 pages long, so we’ve decided to spare you the details here (but you can always read the changelog in full in the Cossack Labs GitHub repository if you want to). Here are the main changes in the new release: