Re: Safe DB Distribution

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jan 29), Suhas Pharkute said:
> Ok, I will explain it again,
> 
> I need a way so that if some body gets the DB files (.MYD and .MYI)
> from my distribution, they can put it in their DB engine and can read
> my DB. I would like to STOP this stealing.
> 
> Is there any way?

If you also give them the php script, then no amount of encryption on
the DB files will help, since the user can simply look at the script
and see how it decrypts the records.  If you write the program in a
compiled language like C and encrypt/decrypt the data before passing it
to mysql, it would be more difficult to extract the data, possibly
difficult enough that none of your users would try.  You can't simply
use mysql's AES_ENCRYPT/AES_DECRYPT functions, since your user could
enable mysql's SQL logging option and read your key from the log.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@stripped