I need to securely store lots of sensitive contact information and notes in a freely available database (eg PostgreSQL or MySQL) that will be stored on a database server which I do not have direct access to. This database will be accessed by a PHP application that I am developing. However, I also need to be able to search/sort these data with the database functions (SELECT, ORDER BY, regexes, etc) so encrypting on
the client side (web application) or using encryption of specific fields
would not work. (For example, Ineed to encrypt contacts' names, but need to be able to search for results by name). (I realize I could load the entire table into memory with PHP and process/search/sort it there, but that's obviously not a very good solution). Ideally I would like to encrypt entire tables. I read something about the pgcrypto contrib
module, but have't been able to discern if it can do ecryption in a
transparent way (e.g. so that I can do regex searches on the data).
My sense is that this is a difficult problem. However, I made the mistake of promising this functionality, so I'm scrambling to figure out some kind of solution. Any suggestions?
