I have an database that has Field Level Encryption. Everything works great and I have no problems for the past year.
NOW Management has been requesting changes and we need to create reports and I need to access one encrypted field.
Is there anyway I can do this, keep the field secure and at the same time allow reporting of the data ?
Thank you for your help in advance
Subject: I needed pointed in the Right Direction on Encryption & Reporting
The entity that is generating the reports needs to have a copy of the key, there is no other way. If you are using symetric encryption that shouldn’t be a big deal but if you are using public key encryption and all of the documents are encrypted for different individuals then you will have a serious challenge for existing documents.
Subject: RE: I needed pointed in the Right Direction on Encryption & Reporting
I appreciate you responding to this
I am using public key encryption for Management. Can you suggest articles / book anything for this for 7.0
or is still covered as in the Notes 6.0 Bible … I just want to make sure that if I start researching and reading on what to do here. I get the right book … otherwise I will really screw this up.
And What would happen if I switched from Public to Symetric ?
Subject: certainly nothing 7.0 specific about it.
the bottom line is that the data is secure. If a person or server can’t unencrypt it then they can’t generate a view or other report containing the data. Just like they couldn’t open up each document in turn and read the encrypted field and type the values into a spreadsheet. Symetric encryption is secret key encryption. Anyone in posession of a common shared key can decrypt stuff encrypted with that key. You can give the server ID a secret key.
Subject: RE: certainly nothing 7.0 specific about it.
Thank you I appreciate the responce very much & sorry to sound so stupid on Encryption.
I really need to get them to agree on a refresher course on on Security.
Subject: RE: I needed pointed in the Right Direction on Encryption & Reporting
Here’s an article I wrote about field encryption several years ago:
As Alan said, however, there’s really no way to access that data unless you are using the ID of someone whose private key was used to encrypt it.
One thing you could do, presuming that the managers are unwilling to run the reports themselves, is to create a special id called “Secure Reporting/MyCompany” and make sure that all the required documents include that name in the PublicEncryptionKeys field. Then someone trusted but cooperative can run the reports whenever required. But you’ll at least need the one-time cooperation of one of the users who currently has access to the docs in order to run an agent to update all the existing docs to add that key.