Hi Cetin,

The data in particular is sensitive in that if it were leaked to the public, someone would be able to see that "so and so is receiving x dollars per month" in payment. The person's address and phone etc information is already encrypted so not that high of a probability that anyone would be able to track down the person but this company has decided that if there were a data breach, they just don't want anyone to know how much the person is receiving - it's more being able to report that "all sensitive information" is encrypted to the privacy authorities.

At the form level, yes it does not take any time to decrypt/encrypt. Where the slowdown comes in is for all their reports where this number is used for sales purposes, that I now have to decrypt that column of data for a bunch of records (they do some reports showing 5 year trends etc). All do-able and maybe not that slow but will have to test. I have already warned them of this and they are willing to wait longer for the data to be chugged through if decrypting.

So yes, will probably just convert to string and encrypt. In that way, it is consistent within the app so that the next guy who comes along to maintain this will not be staring at some really weird field.

Thanks,
Albert

>Short answer is no (I assume "casual hacker" is not a beginner).
>
>It also depends on the meaning of "numeric". For example, if the hacker is amateur enough, and the numeric is a double, then you could use it as datetime (what a datetime is behind the scenes). You could do bit shifting and rotating, bintoc, ctobin with a char field etc. However all of these would have back and forth overhead, converting to string and encrypting might just be the way to go. Probably, it would be easier to transfer the data to another backend and use it.
>
>PS: Conversion + encryption overhead is generally negligible (of course it may not if what you often do is to insert lots of new data). Indexed searches on such a column would also be tricky. And you should keep in mind that string operations in VFP is very slow.
>
>PS: And it is questionable why the key fields be encrypted.