I ran across Craig Boyd's vfpencryption fll through Universal Thread, and it seems well suited to what I need to do. I have a small Fox-driven web application that uses AFP. I want to encrypt some sensitive fields in my tables. I tested a small prg to encrypt and decrypt a string and that seems fine. I have a few questions that occurred to me:

I'm new to encryption, in general, having never implemented any, so if any of this seems stupid, it's because it is. :)

1. Field length. Is the encrypted text produced going to be the same length as the plaintext? If not, can I know it will fit within the field size for the original field?

2. If I store only the encrypted value, how might I maintain a usable index? By making the expression Decrypt(field_name,mykey)?

3. It seems I'm now faced with what to do with the key, so as not to make this whole exercise moot? If I did the above, I'd be embedding the key in the table and that would be unwise.

This library looks great, but I remain a little lost as to how to proceed.

thanks for any suggestions,

Jim