Re: searching for encrypted fields in data columns

Google in the Microsoft newsgroups and you'll find references to various encryption products for SQLServer.

Why is encryption a requirement for your application? Encryption is for authentication and for secure communication in an insecure environment. Assuming the database server is located in a physically secure location and assuming you can use an encrypted network protocol what extra security benefit do you expect to gain from encryption in the database? Encrypted or not the data will still (only) be secured by an access control mechanism of some sort (a user name and password?). Why would access control be more secure if the data is encrypted than if it isn't?

If you want to ensure privacy on an individual basis (each user has access only to his/her own data) then encryption might make sense but in that case you wouldn't expect to do global searches.

--

David Portas
SQL Server MVP
--
Received on Mon Mar 01 2004 - 12:20:42 CST