How to read encrypted database field using Hibernate

Question

I'm working on a project where some database table fields need to be encrypted. The way this will be done is using Microsoft SQL Server built-in encryption/decryption function:

ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE('PASSPHRASE',‘text’)

DECRYPTBYPASSPHRASE ('12',password)

So to insert data the SQL will be like this:

insert into login_details(uid,username,password) values(1,'smith',EncryptByPassPhrase('12',’XXX’))

And to read data the SQL will be this way:

select uid,username, DECRYPTBYPASSPHRASE ('12',password) as Password from login_details

So my question is how I can I make use of this in Hibernate using my existing OR mappings? I'm using JPA Annotations. Is there an easy way to do this with JPA annotations?

Answer 1

I don't see how you might do that. But from what I've read, ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE uses triple-DES. So you might encrypt the data yourself and persist it as is with Hibernate. Here's how it would look like to make it transparent (except for queries, obviously)

@Entity
public class LoginDetails {
    @Column(name = "password")
    private byte[] encryptedPassword;

    @Transient
    private String password;

    public String getPassword() {
        if (password == null) {
            password = CryptoUtils.decrypt(encryptedPassword);
        }
        return password;
    }

    public void setPassword(String password) {
        this.encryptedPassword = CryptoUtils.encrypt(password);
        this.password = password;
    }
}

where CryptoUtils would be responsible for storing the secret key and encrypting/decrypting using triple-DES (which is natively supported in the JDK : see http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/security/crypto/CryptoSpec.html#Cipher)

Just make sure to test it and make sure that your decryption is able to decrypt what SQL-Server has encrypted, and vice-versa.