Apache Solr and data encryption

Question

I currently use Solr 4.x and I'm involved in a project in which the data contains potential PII (personally identifiable information) aka sensitive data. Was wondering if there is an effective and efficient way to protect this data within Apache Solr (encryption of full index, encryption of certain fields, etc.)? has anyone actually implemented this approach? if so, is the encryption approach still in use? this post provides some input but, doesn't seem like an efficient clear cut solution, mind you the post is dated early 2012. has there been any advances with a solution to this issue since?

Answer 1

If you want encryption of indexed fields, hosting the index on an encrypted file system is safe and easy. Research on techniques that index encrypted fields is underway, but it's difficult to preserve security when a keyword reliably encrypts to the same cipher text.

If you want to encrypt fields that are stored but not indexed, the application could manage the encryption and decryption of the fields, and Solr would just store an opaque chunk of data.