GDPR in Ozone

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a law that governs how personal data should be handled. This is an European Union law, but due to the nature of software oftentimes spills into other geographies.

Ozone supports GDPR’s Right to Erasure(Right to be Forgotten) feature

When GDPR support is enabled all the keys are encrypt, by default. The encryption key is stored on the metadata server and used to encrypt the data for each of the requests.

In case of a key deletion, Ozone deletes the metadata immediately but the binary data is deleted at the background in an async way. With GDPR support enabled, the encryption key is deleted immediately and as is, the data won’t be possible to read any more even if the related binary (blocks or containers) are not yet deleted by the background process).

Once you create a GDPR compliant bucket, any key created in that bucket will automatically be GDPR compliant.

Enabling GDPR compliance in Ozone is very straight forward. During bucket creation, you can specify --enforcegdpr=true or -g=true and this will ensure the bucket is GDPR compliant. Thus, any key created under this bucket will automatically be GDPR compliant.

GDPR can only be enabled on a new bucket. For existing buckets, you would have to create a new GDPR compliant bucket and copy data from old bucket into new bucket to take advantage of GDPR.

Example to create a GDPR compliant bucket:

ozone sh bucket create --enforcegdpr=true /hive/jan
ozone sh bucket create -g=true /hive/jan

If you want to create an ordinary bucket then you can skip --enforcegdpr and -g flags.

References

• Design doc