For client-side encryption with AWS KMS, the documented pattern is envelope encryption : you use KMS to generate and protect a data encryption key (DEK) , and you use that DEK locally to encrypt the actual data. This is the correct approach for large payloads (such as 10 MB documents), because the KMS Encrypt API is intended for encrypting small amounts of data (KMS is not designed to directly encrypt multi-megabyte application payloads).
With envelope encryption, the application calls GenerateDataKey on AWS KMS, specifying the KMS key (customer managed key) to use. KMS returns two versions of the DEK in the response:
a plaintext DEK (usable immediately by the application for local cryptographic operations), and
a ciphertext (encrypted) DEK that is encrypted under the specified KMS key.
The application then uses the plaintext DEK to encrypt the 10 MB document on the client side (for example, using an authenticated encryption mode such as AES-GCM via a standard crypto library). After encryption completes, the application must not persist the plaintext DEK; instead, it stores the encrypted document alongside the ciphertext DEK . Later, to decrypt, the application sends the ciphertext DEK to KMS using Decrypt to recover the plaintext DEK, and then decrypts the document locally.
Therefore, option D is correct because it explicitly uses GenerateDataKey and the plaintext DEK to encrypt the data, which is the required envelope-encryption flow. Options A, B, and C do not follow the correct KMS envelope-encryption process for large client-side payloads.
