Re: Transparent encryption in PostgreSQL?

""Matt McNeil"" <mcneil@callahanpro.com> wrote in message news:20050713191150.7D88752BDF@svr1.postgresql.org...

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