While OS-level access control can offer some security over the provenance data written to the disk in a repository, there are scenarios where the data may be sensitive, compliance and regulatory requirements exist, or NiFi is running on hardware not under the direct control of the organization (cloud, etc.). In this case, the provenance repository allows for all data to be encrypted before being persisted to the disk.

Performance The current implementation of the encrypted provenance repository intercepts the record writer and reader of WriteAheadProvenanceRepository, which offers significant performance improvements over the legacy PersistentProvenanceRepository and uses the AES/GCM algorithm, which is fairly performant on commodity hardware. In most scenarios, the added cost will not be significant (unnoticeable on a flow with hundreds of provenance events per second, moderately noticeable on a flow with thousands - tens of thousands of events per second). However, administrators should perform their own risk assessment and performance analysis and decide how to move forward. Switching back and forth between encrypted/unencrypted implementations is not recommended at this time.