It has been my honor to have another article published on 4GuysFromRolla.com. Entitled “An Overview of Cryptographic Systems and Encrypting Database Data” and is the first of a two three part series.

The first part (published today) gives an overview of what exactly is encryption, what are its properties, how can it be used, and what facilities SQL Server 2005 offers to help one create a cryptosystem.

In part two, we go over SQL Server 2005’s key hierarchy, and T-SQL functions and statements that can be used with symmetric keys to encrypt/decrypt data.

Part three, will introduce asymmetric encryption in SQL Server 2005, and how one can retrieve and send ecrypted data to/from an ASP .NET v2.0 web page.
Hope you enjoy them!

Update 2/28/2007: The final and third part of this article series has been posted entitled, “Using Asymmetric Encryption and Digital Signatures in a SQL Server 2005 Database“.

Update 2/21/2007: The second part of the three part series has been been posted entitled, “Using Symmetric Encryption in a SQL Server 2005 Database“.

If you ever want to see a list of keys in your current database or see some of their properties (e.g. the encryption alogorithm used), just use the two statements below to list your symmetric and asymmetric keys from the system catalog views:

SELECT * FROM sys.symmetric_keys;
SELECT * FROM sys.asymmetric_keys;