Re: Encryption/Decryption Question

At 8:09 PM -0400 8/11/10, Bastien Koert wrote:

From my experience, I'd have to say that it would be a real tough go to crack that. If there was a weak point in the scheme is that your end result pattern ( the ssn ) is defined with a pair of constants, the hyphens. In our scheme we remove the dashes and just provide a mask for display. We also keep a unique key with each ssn, the record number for extra security.

The SS numbers can be stored in any format (with/without hyphens, reversed, transposed, predetermined mixing, whatever). Of course, there can be another field where a unique key is kept, but I'm not sure how that might improve security.

Where to keep it is tougher, OWASP suggests that the keys be stored on another non web facing server, with a locked down filesystem. That would be best if you have the hardware available.

So that I understand, you are talking about two web sites where one (domain1.com) would contain/run the scripts and the other (domain2.com) contained the keys. It would work like so: When the script launches in domain1.com, the script would ask (after authorization) domain2.com for the keys, which are kept in a locked directory. After which the Encryption/Decryption scheme would work. Is that it?

One other option here is to load the keys into ram on server start up and never have them physically on the machine.

I'm not sure as to how to make that work. But I assume that it requires a dedicated server, right? Cheers, tedd -- ------- http://sperling.com/