Acra: Open-source database protection with field-level encryption and intrusion detection

Cossack Labs updated its flagship open-source product Acra database security suite to version 0.90.0 and made many of its core security features previously available only for enterprise customers free in Acra Community Edition.

“Following our mission to empower developers to build secure products of any scale and in any market, we chose to open-source all fundamental controls, for years available only to commercial customers,” said Eugene Pilyankevich, CTO of Cossack Labs.

Acra’s features enable the implementation of application-level encryption in modern cloud applications, saving development costs and allowing tighter grip on sensitive data lifecycle.

Acra’s technology highlights include searchable encryption: providing a way to keep data encrypted and still be able to securely search over it, without constraining the application architecture, made available in the open-source 0.90.0 release. Data masking and tokenization give additional possibilities to keep data at hand but well-hidden from unauthorised access. A built-in data leakage prevention system allows to detect unauthorised behaviour and effectively respond to it.

Acra is built to secure sensitive data inside modern distributed apps, clouds and databases, making the life of solution architects and operations teams easier.

Security teams value that Acra unifies security control set around sensitive data, combining 9 strong data security controls on one choke point to data access: application-level encryption, searchable encryption, data masking, data tokenization, connections’ authentication, data leakage prevention, cryptographically signed audit logs, database request firewall, and security events automation.

Acra Community Edition can be downloaded from the GitHub repository, featuring many “try without coding” engineering examples and preconfigured infrastructures.