Hi Gary, I have been reading through these articles and it really does make it seems very secure, but the plainttext connection is still being sent over to the sql machine, as you stated, right?
I cannot seem to find any info on how to send an encrypted string to the db and have the db machine decrypt it properly before making the connection. still a little unsure if i am missing something though. Bill Gary Mort <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Bill P. wrote: > Hello, > > I have a project that will be using IIS and mssql. > I need to use an encrypted conneciton string in my config/lib.php file. > > mssql has built in encryption connection ability, but within asp. > > Everything will be written in php so does anyone have any suggestions > on encrypting a connection string to connect to a mssql db? > What's the point of encrypting the data? Reading through http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998280.aspx and http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998283.aspx, it is purely a local system server protection. IE You have web servers A. B. and C You have MSSQL Server D and a database(MyDatabase) A web application running on the WEB server wants to connect to the MSSQL server. Using ASP,. some code somewhere says "Connect to MyDatabase, a MSSQL Database " ASP will then search for a text file called web.conf, and it will grab the connection information stored there(the server it is on, the database name, yadda yadda). Than it connects up to the server and does whatever you want it to do. "Encrypted connection string" just means that the data stored in that text file is encrypted, using either an RSA mechanism or DPAPI - which to tell you the truth is completely beyond me. I know there are different mechanisms for encryption. I know in a general way how public/private key encryption works. And I know the longer the key length, in general, the more secure and the longer to process. When I need to know more than that, I research what the industry stds are at that time, what is the best performance for a situation, and move on. Trying to understand the math behind it all would drive me bonkers. Using encrypted connection strings, the ASP program has an extra step. It accesses the text file, grabs the data, and then decrypts the data and uses it. It doesn't actually send the data in an encrypted format to the server - the key to noticing this for me was that your ASP program can display the plaintext decoded info to you, so it's decoding it on the web server. So really, you get the same benefit by choosing any encryption scheme you like for PHP and encrypting the connection information file that your using. The only reason I can see to use "encrypted connection strings" the Microsoft way is the method used in that RSA article(link above). There, they suggest that for a server farm, what you would do is create the connection string file on the MSSQL server system(or on your own system, whatever. The point is, you don't create it on servers A,B, and C). Than you encrypt the file using RSA and transfer both the encrypted file AND the RSA private key needed to decrypt the file to servers A,B,and C. Than by installing them under the appropriate user, web apps running under that user can decrypt the data. If that is your goal, find a PHP RSA decryption routine, place the private key somewhere secure on your server, and use the key to decrypt the connection string file. Than parse the file and shove the appropriate fields into your PHP connection. If you want to use their method, they store the private key in the registry, so you can pull it out the same way. Am I missing something here on how encrypted connection string works? (Besides the obvious that Microsoft went to great lengths to describe a fairly simple process in complex language such that it would appear to be a function exclusive to their API, instead of a fairly trivial implementation of standard config file encryption. I mean, on first glance, I thought it was pretty cool, the concept being that you would provide the web servers with a connection string encrypted just for each server, and that server would send the encrypted data to the database server - thus it would not ever know what the true userid and password was and since the key is assigned to an ip address, a connection using the same config file from a different system would be rejected. But no, it doesn't seem to be that, just a local config file encryption.) _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php --------------------------------- Take the Internet to Go: Yahoo!Go puts the Internet in your pocket: mail, news, photos & more.
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