Re Encryption

Hi. I've not had any experience of any commercial packages for doing the encryption, but I know they are a problem to implement.

The problem is that you cannot index encrypted data. The reason for this is that such things as wildcards in searches will not work. You can extract SMITH and SMITHS by searching for SMITH%, but if encrypted, SMITH may be 'QWERTY123' and SMITHS may be 'ASDFG789' - they are very different and there is no relationship between the encrypted versions as there is for the uncrypted versions (i.e. they share the same five letters). So any kind of indexing scheme that is used will not be able to make use of these data item relationships.

Another problem is that somewhere you will need to provide functionality to decrypt that data - so if the users can get at the encrypted data then it is likely they can get at the decrypting tool as well. It is better to stop the users getting at the data they are not supposed to see in the first place.

If you just want to encrypt data as it is transferred from one system to another (over public or insecure lines) then this is probably not a database issue - try taking a look at SQL*Net (some method of encrypting here rings a bell - but I am not sure) or some other layer that sits in the networking protocols below the database.

I am sorry this doesn't answer your question directly - but I hope it is of some use.

Regards,

Jason Judge

P.S. Please feel free to copy this to the newsgroup - I don't have access to it from where I am today.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ANDREW_LONGWORTH_at_HP-Germany-om21.om.hp.com
> [SMTP:ANDREW_LONGWORTH_at_HP-Germany-om21.om.hp.com]
> Sent: 27 October 1999 15:43
> To: jason.judge_at_virgin.net
> Subject: Re: URGENT : Encryption
>
> Cheers.
> Is it possible you could give me some ideas on these methods or tell me
> where I can find out about them, as I have never heard of these before.
>
> Jason Judge <jason.judge_at_virgin.net> wrote in message
> <7v5dop$co4$1_at_nclient13-gui.server.virgin.net>...
> > You could encrypt the data - but how do you get it back out again?
> Enough
> > must be left uncrypted to allow you to search for the information you
> need.
> >
> > The best security is to hide the data in other ways - use roles, grants,
> > packages etc.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Jason Judge
Received on Wed Oct 27 1999 - 18:21:16 CEST