Michael,
thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. I gave your white
paper a brief read (only because I am working on another project this
morning), and it looks to be incredibly helpful.
Encryption is a seriously important issue (especially with all the
mistakes we have been hearing about concerning Database data files
leaving companies on laptops and mysteriously becoming public
domain). The sensitive data must be encrypted but still be useful
enough to serve its function in a relational DB context.
I will reply later with comments/questions.
Thanks again,
Joe
On Feb 6, 2009, at 9:35 AM, Michael Gentry wrote:
Joe, something I've explored doing (wrote a little paper on it, but
never
implemented it) was to have a pair of values for sensitive fields.
One is
the encrypted value (socialSecurityNumber) and the other is a version
(socialSecurityNumberVersion). The version field maps to different
keys
used to encrypt the main field. This allows for the keys to be
changed (due
to an employee leaving or perhaps you have a 3 month mandate for key
changes) while still allowing you to read the old values. The key
file
should be kept on the disk and protected by Unix file permissions so
others
can't read it easily.
I'm not sure if I made sense, but I've you'd like, I can dig up my
little
paper to send you (it might be more helpful). Just tell me the
formats you
can read (right now it is a Google Doc).
mrg
On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 11:01 PM, Joe Baldwin
<[email protected]>wrote:
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.
