Greetings,
I need to securely store lots of sensitive contact
information and
notes in a freely available database (eg PostgreSQL or MySQL) that
will be
stored on a database server which I do not have direct access to.
This database will be accessed by a PHP application that I
am
developing. However, I also need to be able to search/sort these
data
with the database functions (SELECT, ORDER BY, etc) so encrypting on
the client side (web application)
or using encryption of specific fields
would not work. (For example,
I need to encrypt
contacts' names,
but need to be able to search for
results by name). (I
realize I could load the entire table into
memory with PHP and
process/search/sort it there, but
that's obviously
not a very good solution). Ideally I would like to
encrypt entire
tables. I read something about the
pgcrypto contrib
module, but have't been able to
discern if it can do ecryption in a
transparent way (e.g. so that I can do regex searches
on the data).
My sense is that this is a difficult problem.
However, I made the
mistake of promising this functionality,
so I'm
scrambling to figure out some kind of solution.
Any
suggestions?
Thanks so much!
Matt
