Encrypt MySQL database
 

Before signing up and ordering my own copy of vBulletin I'm interested in the following.

Is there some way to buy some plugin to be able to encrypt parts of the database ? I will have some sensitive information in it (for example CC's) and it would be very bad if the MySQL database was stolen..

Regards
Dennis

Most of the time stuff like that is handled with php. For example vBulletin hashes user passwords with md5 and a salt, the plain text version is never stored in the database itself.

When a user logs in the password they submit is hashed the same way, and checked against the one in the database. If they match then the user has inserted the correct password and is logged in, otherwise they are given an incorrect password error.

This is not the same as encryption, but can serve the same purpose. The difference is encrypted data can be unencrypted, while hashed data can only be matched against other hashed data to find matches.

Hope that helps.

Another option is to send the CC info to a third-party, secured server.