Hi,
I think of using AES Encryption for some time now, because it seems to be the most secure encryption method in MySQL at this moment and table encryption of some sort is not possible. In the documentation I read BLOB fields are recommended for storage of data with AES_Encrypt, otherwise you might lose data. Does this method of storing data with encryption in BLOB fields also have disadvantages (besides speed and queries being longer), like how much bigger will the data get? Also, while testing I experienced that inputting something like more then 255 characters with AES_Encrypt, the AES_Decrypt function doesn't give back more then 255 characters. Is this correct, or am I doing something wrong here? I intent to use the EAS encryption functions for a webbased student administration system which stores data like student names, addresses, results, etc, and because some of the data is quite important, like addresses and results (may not be changed or viewed by unauthorized persons) and the database environment is not of high security (shared host, because of costs) I intend to use these encryption functions. Do you also have some recommendations on if I'm doing the most reasonable thing here to use the AES encryption? And a question I always had is where to store the keys? Currently I'm thinking somewhere in the webapplication source code, but I'm not so sure about this. Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks, Martin
