WebApp Sec mailing list archives
Re: RDB-based secure data storage
From: Ivan Ristic <ivanr () webkreator com>
Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 15:43:51 +0100
Calum Power wrote:
G'day webappsec, I have been asked by my employer to design a system for storing sensative private data collected from the company's clients. They tell me that this data MUST be very secure, yet clients must be able to update the information themselves via a Web-based interface. My immediate reaction was to use something like GPG/PGP to encrypt the data before storing it in a RDBMS like MySQL. However this then has the additional problem of needing the user to edit the data. My next thought would be to have each clients 'username' be a public GPG key, and their 'password' be the passphrase to this private key. This of course would not be overly secure, and the 'administrator' of this would not be able to update the information without using the users' password. So, I was just wondering if anyone had come across the same problem. Perhaps there's a method of encryption that I'm overlooking.
You can combine encryption methods to achieve the goal: 1. Generate a private-public key pair for every user. 2. For each piece of information you store, generate a new secret and use it to encrypt information (using symmetrical encryption for better performance). 3. Never store the secret in plain text. Instead, create a copy of the secret for every user that has the right to access the information, and store the secret encrypting it with their public key. When a user want to access a piece of information, their private key will be used to decrypt the secret, and then the secret will be used to decrypt the actual data. 4. It would be a good idea to have a special public-private key pair, to use it to encrypt all secrets that are generated, for backup purposes. -- ModSecurity (http://www.modsecurity.org) [ Open source IDS for Web applications ]
Current thread:
- RDB-based secure data storage Calum Power (May 13)
- Re: RDB-based secure data storage Ivan Ristic (May 13)
- Re: RDB-based secure data storage Calum Power (May 14)
- Re: RDB-based secure data storage Ivan Ristic (May 14)
- Re: RDB-based secure data storage Calum Power (May 14)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: RDB-based secure data storage Klevitsky, Alexander (May 13)
- RE: RDB-based secure data storage Michael Silk (May 14)
- RE: RDB-based secure data storage Runion Mark A FGA DOIM WEBMASTER(ctr) (May 14)
- Re: RDB-based secure data storage Ivan Ristic (May 13)