Encrypt/Decrypt functions not available?

Question

Hi,

I was wondering when the

ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE / DECRYPTBYPASSPHRASE would be made available for SQL Azure. Other than building the encryption functions in the gui, are there any other functions that will do simple encryption on Azure?

Thanks,
-m

Answer 1

Hello,
HASHBYTES ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174415.aspx ) is available and I am having no issues using it.
Well, it is a one-way encryption function using either of MD2 | MD4 | MD5 | SHA | SHA1 algorythms.
Since I see you are going to use it to encrypt a passphrase, you can also use this HashBytes. I prefer it since it uses one-way hashing algorythms, so there is no way to get back the encrypted data even if you have the hash (well, OK I kwno about the roumors that MD5 is no longer considered as one-way and someone somewhere discovered a method to get back the initially encrypted data). The usage is as simple as:

... AND

 

HASHBYTES('sha1',@uPwd) = U.Password

You can also have some random generated SALT to append to the raw password provided in @uPwd parameter, and have this salt stored in another place. It's just how secure you want your system to be.

Answer 2

Thanks Anton! I will give that a shot and see how it works. That should be perfect.

-m