Creditcard Number Security was Re: Encrypted column

On 05/06/07, Andrew Sullivan <ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 09:28:00AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> >
> > If he is a CC customer, the system (which I am DBA of) bills his
> > card directly, saving the customer much time and effort.
>
> So surely what you have is a completely separate system that has
> exactly one interface to it, that is signaled to provide a
> transaction number and that only ever returns such a transaction
> number to the "online" system, and that is very tightly secured,
> right?
>
> It is possible to make trade-offs in an intelligent manner, for sure,
> but you sure as heck don't want that kind of data stored online with
> simple reversible encryption.
>
> A

Unfortunately you still need to store them somewhere, and all systems can
be hacked. Yes its a good idea to store them on a separate system and this
is an important part of designing your systems to ensure that the simple
user interface is somehow limited.

Peter.