Hi, I need to develop an application where the protection of the data (to be stored on a database) should be very important (perhaps the principal requirement).
THe goal is to have the data stored in a way that even the admin or anyone that hacks the web and/or database server could not (or easily) recover the original data. First of all I am not a security expert and the protection need not to be military-grade, just strong enough to make things harder. I would like to share a couple of ideias but mostly interestered in phpers experiences and opinions. 1) Use mcrypt The user should have to create a phrase and all sensitive data will be stored using this phrase. Since the phrase will not be hardcoded in the php scripts, even if the web is hacked it will not be recovered. For each row I would store the encrypted value and the initialization vector. In order to recover the value at the beginning of the session (when the user logs in) I could store the phrase as session variable (encrypted with mcrypt and a system phrase?) If the user decides to change the phrase a big update in all encrypted rows/fields would be necessary. 2) Use PGP Basically the same ideia but differnt encryption tool/scheme. Not sure how to implement or if there is any gain. Well any tips/sugestions/opinions are welcome. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
