Hello Ann,

> Encryption is a problem - first, because secure encryption is very
> expensive and insecure encryption is ... well ... insecure.

There's no such thing as perfect security (at least it's a security
risk to assume there is), but why should good encryption be very
expensive?

Myself, I often use the Rijndael algorithm, which was chosen for
AES. Everybody can use this algorithm freely. There are also
implementations available (free and commercial). Just do a web search.

The implementation I used as a starting point is Brian Gladman's. It
can be found at

http://fp.gladman.plus.com/cryptography_technology/rijndael/

It took me some time to figure things out, and then it took some more
time to write a couple of high-level encryption/decription routines,
but once you have set that up, it's simply a matter of feeding the
data to the encryption routine and storing the encrypted data in the
database.

Of course this is no _guarantee_ for security. But as far as anybody
knows, this is strong encryption. It is now the U.S. Govt. standard,
expected to remain secure for the next 20-30 years.


Greetings,
Paul Vinkenoog