Is encrypting the database an efficient measure? How to protect data against leaks?

Question

With the recent problems of password leaks and personal information from the most diverse sites, there is evidence of a lack of zeal regarding the storage of such information by certain companies, showing total disregard for the trust of the user who provides such sensitive data.

Some programmers although use hashs to protect passwords, ignore the salt. Or, although passwords are protected, other information such as emails, addresses and credit card numbers are saved in plain text.

1. Database encryption is the solution?
2. What are the pros and cons of this solution?
3. And as for the use of algorithms hash, what should be used and how best?
4. As other information (ex: e-mail, telephone and addresses) must be stored?
5. How these measures affect application performance?

Answer 1

Yes, it is. If you use a suitable mechanism, usually provided by the databases themselves.

Some provide the possibility to encrypt only a few parts, a column, for example.

They can also offer different encryption methods. You need to choose one suitable to what you want.

Note that password usually deserves a different encryption from the database. A database is often encrypted so that data can be easily decrypted when needed. Generally we do not want passwords to be decrypted, which gives more security.

Data that needs to be decrypted (email, phone, and addresses) offer less security because somewhere it will be decrypted, somewhere it will have a key and a decryption algorithm. It has some techniques to increase security, but in a compromised system it doesn’t have much to do. The only way to give greater security, but far from perfect, is the decryption only occur in the client using public and private keys.

Leaks occur because they use inadequate safety techniques.

One of the most common flaws with passwords is the lack of a good salt. Another is to use hash bad.

All this is in question and create.

What is the alternative of not doing the encryption? Leave with nothing? It seems obvious to me that it is worse.

It’ll affect performance a little bit, but nothing strong.

Otherwise it can be read in the question: How to hash passwords securely?. It is practically a duplicate (at least in this part).

Answer 2

Good morning, for passwords I always use a hash sha1 or something that has no return, always merge with a key of its own as date or a text or something that varies from client to client.

To encrypt user information I advise you to generate a key for each user, it can be an md5 of a timestamp NOW() that serves. then you have a key your q no one has access that one way or another you use it along with the client key and encrypt his data passing through a crypt or a Base64 using this key.

Once this is done, whoever picks up db will already have a huge difficulty discovering its key to see the contents of the generated hashs. The guy would have to hack into your system and see in hardcode the generated key.

---- I’ll give an ex using php ----

to generate the key for each user

$key=md5($nomedousuario.$email.date('Ymd'));

what has been done up there is to generate a single key for this user Prox step you have to have a key your or more of a key like I do but in case I will only exemplify with 1 for you to understand the process.

$minhakey="87ye7jn789heyn986db87b";

I generated a random key that you can treat her however you want. in my case I do the following

$key_completa = str_replace("7"," ",$key.$minhakey);

what has been done is to remove the number 7 ( for freshness ) and generate a unique key that nobody knows exists, this is the secret of the thing vc has q have a key q vc know how it was generated to encrypt all information so that there is a way to read it.

To encrypt the content you do the following now, let’s assume that I have the customer email and want to protect , will stay like this, Obs. use these functions I’m going through to facilitate the process.

function encrypt($data, $key){
    return base64_encode(
    mcrypt_encrypt(
        MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128,
        $key,
        $data,
        MCRYPT_MODE_CBC,
        "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"
    )
);
}
function decrypt($data, $key){
    $decode = base64_decode($data);
    return mcrypt_decrypt(
                    MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128,
                    $key,
                    $decode,
                    MCRYPT_MODE_CBC,
                    "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"
            );


}

to encode

$email_protegido=encrypt("[email protected]",$key_completa);

to decode

$email_legivel=decrypt($email_protegido,$key_completa);

to increase security go can hide the code that generates the key doing so.

you will transform the whole function into a base 64

echo base64_encode('$key_completa = str_replace("7"," ",$key.$minhakey);');

will return it here

JGtleV9jb21wbGV0YSA9IHN0cl9yZXBsYWNlKCI3IiwiICIsJGtleS4kbWluaGFrZXkpOw==

then just do so to run

eval(base64_decode('JGtleV9jb21wbGV0YSA9IHN0cl9yZXBsYWNlKCI3IiwiICIsJGtleS4kbWluaGFrZXkpOw=='));

so the guy who has a cess to Cod will have a hard time finding out what the q is.

of course you can use a zend to encrypt all your php increasing security