database encryption

Question

Hi all,

I need my database to be secure in case of the hard drive being stolen.

I have not seen many databases (even mainstream ones) claiming to support encryption.

• Do you guys know of any databases that support encryption?
• If I'm using a database that doesn't support encryption, is it a bad idea to encrypt data natively (using java encryption libraries, for example)? Would this potentially cause a problem for databases with strongly typed fields?
• What other solutions are available for encrypting my database?

Please let me know.

Thanks in advance, jbu

Answer 1

Maybe you should think to encrypt your entire hard disk drive. This is done natively at the filesystem level.

It uses the windows credentials to encrypt it. So, even if your entire computer is stolen, your data is protected.

The stealer will have to reformat the drive to use it.

Of course, if your computer use auto-login, it's not an option for you.

HTH, even if it's not really a database encryption solution.

Answer 2

Fujitsu and Samsung sell hard drives that incorporate the encryption at the hard drive level. I don't know if these are an option for your problem.

Answer 3

SQL Compact DBs offer encryption out of the box by giving them a password.

http://blogs.msdn.com/stevelasker/archive/2008/05/14/security-and-encryption-for-sql-server-compact.aspx

Answer 4

Not sure if it's an option for you, but the developer of SQLite sells versions of the library that utilize encrypted database backends: http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/prosupport.html#crypto.

Answer 5

MS SQL Server 2008 definitely supports it. Not so sure about older versions.

Answer 6

Both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle have support for database encryption. SQL Server 2008 adds Transparent Data Encryption which did not exist in SQL Server 2005 which only supported cell level encryption.

Answer 7

Sybase SQL Anywhere supports both 128-bit and 256-bit AES encryption.

Answer 8

Oracle has support for something called Transparent Encryption and it works with a wallet.

Perhaps due to our implementation, we did not have success with it. We ran into issues where once ANY credentialed user (ie. one with the wallet entry) accessed the data, it was open for all those that had access to the table. If your concern is only for encryption at rest, this might work for you (you would want to verify in Oracle's documentation that it does encrypt at rest) - if you need encrypted transmission in/out of the DB, I'm not certain this is what you're after.

All that said - I think going with a solution such as the hard drive-level encryption suggested in another post is probably more up your alley, given your question.

Disclaimer: I am not a DBA by trade, so I can only offer this from the experience we had with the Oracle technology. I work at a Fortune 500 company, and we certainly had the right types of people looking at it.

Answer 9

If you are looking for a good embedded database that supports encryption, I'd recommend SQLCipher*, which is a version of SQLite that provides transparent database encryption under an open source license. The obvious use case is in mobile and stand-alone applications.

*Full disclosure: I'm on the dev team.