These are all good points. I can do it either way as far as the
business rules go. I was just looking for some suggestions as to best
practices. The downside to using the database-managed encryption,
is that it makes the Cayenne code pretty messy (unless of course that
I have missed some Utility/Convenience method that deals with applying
MySQL functions to fetched data).
I can brute-force this, as I mentioned earlier, by making the
conversions via Cayenne select queries and the #result directives
pattern. My implementation turned out to be kind of messy and so I
was thinking there has to be a better way.
Perhaps the Java-domain solution is the easiest.
On Feb 5, 2009, at 6:26 PM, Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
On 06/02/2009, at 9:36 AM, Joe Baldwin wrote:
What design (or pattern) is best for fields that are to be encrypted?
MySQL has quite a few simple functions that can be used to encrypt
data. However, when using Cayenne to fetch the data I have not
found a simple solution.
I think the answer depends on why you are encrypting data and where
the key will be stored to decrypt the data. Some options:
1. Store the key in the model and use keys hardcoded in SQL
templates to use mysql to d/encrypt. Anyone who got access to both
the database and the model would be able to decrypt all the data.
How secure is the model?
2. Do the whole thing in Java where the encryption is much closer
the point of data entry/view. This gives you many more options for
how you manage the encryption and for how long the unencrypted copy
exists in memory or is pushed across networks, say between the
application server and the database server.
But for you, does it matter whether unencrypted data lives in memory
or across the network? If not, would it do instead to store the
database on an encrypted disk partition?
Also ask yourself whether you might be better hashing the data
rather than encrypting it. For passwords, that is always a better
idea. For credit card numbers it still lets you detect duplicates.
Ari Maniatis
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