Cryptography in database applications

Abstract

Concerns on data security have been aroused after several times of data leakages happened on large scale web-based Management Information Systems (MIS). The major focus of security of MIS has been put on the communication channels between clients and servers. The data will then be inserted into databases after receiving by servers and remain unencrypted, which may lead to a risk of data leakage if the database servers at the very back-end are being compromised. This project aims to study the application of cryptography at the application level in a human resources management system. The data are encrypted before they are inserted into database servers. In this way, the impact of data leakage is minimized even though the database is being compromised. The idea of partial encryption, applied in which data with different levels of sensitivity, will be studied and implemented. Also, the security requirements of the proposed system will be analyzed and addressed.