I am just looking for some direction here. I am working on a site that will be dealing with a lot of users personal data, such as SSN, addresses, etc. Some of this information I would need to encrypt and it will be stored in a MySQL database. I have read some about crypt() and md5. These are one way encryption, what I am looking for is some way to allow the user to update their information so these would not work. What else should I look into? What is the safest secure way of dealing with this?

Thanks
Mike

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Mike
http://www.eclecticpixel.com

hey harpua

what infomation do you want to encrypt and what will users be able to update? :D .... that can help me answer your question....

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Hey Moharo
One field is social security numbers, I have it set as a varchar. There are some financial information also which I have as decimals. This is read only, so I can change datatypes if necessary.

Thanks
Mike

Peace
Mike
http://www.eclecticpixel.com
http://www.homegrownmusicjam.com

md5() is good to use for managing passwords.
If you are sending credit card numbers or other similar confidential information to client browser, consider purchasing a SSL certificate. Do you think, someone will connect to your database and retrieve all important information? You need see PHP manual for some algorithm that uses a key plus argument for encryption-n-decryption, then.