Is information in the database encrypted?

[Guest]

Is information in the database encrypted?

If not, is it advisable to encrypt it?

And how does one do that?

 

And what about encrypting the php files that Oscommerce uses

(E.g I've got a paid contribution that encrypted the code with phpcipher or something like that).

[Guest]

Richard,

 

The only thing that I know of that is encrypted in the database is the users passwords, but I may be mistaken. On this note though, if your host has the proper security precautions in place and you have an SSL on your store then AND you have all of the available security precautions in place in your code, then I believe that should be sufficient to protect your information.

 

 

 

Chris

[Guest]

I have all the security precautions in place that I'm currently aware of.

 

If one also wanted to encrypt other data (like user addresses and email addresses), how can one do this?

[MrPhil]

Technically, passwords are hashed, which is a one-way encryption (enter PW, hash it, compare to stored hash). The "clear text" password is never stored anywhere, and is not easily recoverable from the hash.

 

Proper use of SSL (https) will protect sensitive user information in transit, but not in the database. You would have to modify the PHP code to encrypt such data going in, and decrypt it going out. Note that any hacker with access to the database to see the encrypted data would also have access to the PHP code to see what encryption is being done, and could quickly obtain the data in clear text. Therefore, it's probably wasted effort to try to encrypt user data, rather than protecting data transmission with SSL and ensuring data center physical security. You may need to add SSL usage to certain pages with user information, if they're not already protected.

 

There might be a way to encrypt the entire database (I don't know if MySQL offers this), to prevent casual browsing by a system administrator or someone. However, since your application (osC) needs to decrypt the data in order to use it, presumably the keys and other decode information would be easy to find.

 

Encrypted PHP code is possible, so that you cannot easily see the code (see Zend, phpcipher, etc.). However, it's not foolproof, and with a little bit of effort I'm sure you could get in and read it. Combining an encrypted database (full or partial) with encrypted code might add a bit more security against casual snooping, but would probably not stop a determined hacker.

 

If you're looking to meet PCI-DSS security standards for handling customer credit card information, they have a long checklist of things you need to do (including paying for security audits).