To add to what Jonathan said...

If you're storing the blobs within the database, then you'd want to wrap
your insert functionality with an encryption method.

As you say, they are probably using version 7.

Even under version 10, you'd probably want to use some form of hardware
encryption.

Depending on the size and number of blobs, you're going to get lousy
performance if you're not using hardware.

If you are using 10 or higher, you would still be better off not using the
AES or TDES encryption routines within the engine. If only because you'll
want the speed of hardware encryption.

Also you still have the issue of key management, although there are some
tricks around that.

Note: There's more to encryption that the physical task. ;-)



>From: Jonathan Leffler <jleffler@earthlink.net>
>To: informix-list@iiug.org
>Subject: Re: Encryption with BLOBS
>Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 04:53:51 GMT
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>
>mark.scranton@gmail.com wrote:
> > I have a client that is wondering if anyone has experience with
> > encrypted BLOBs and IDS. Anyone? They haven't started using them yet,
> > but are wondering about performance implications and other pertinent
> > issues, good or bad.
> >
> > I assume they're v7 blobs btw, not slobs (uh - smartblobs that is...)
>
>If they are BYTE and TEXT (non-smart blobs), then they aren't encrypted
>by standard IDS facilities, so the performance is under their control.
>
>The version 10 column-level encryption functions can handle any data
>type except BYTE and TEXT.
>
>Assuming you are using BLOB and CLOB types, BLOBs are not Base-64
>encoded, so they grow by a constant amount. CLOBs, on the other hand,
>are Base-64 encoded, so (in the limit) they are expanded to about 4/3
>times the original size when encrypted (N bytes input becomes 4N/3 + X
>for a modest value of X).
>
>--
>Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h>
>Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com
>Guardian of DBD::Informix v2007.0226 -- http://dbi.perl.org/
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