Cryptography

To prevent the dissemination of sensitive information from the database to unauthorized users or outside competitive or hostile agents, an organization must establish effective security policies. The art of protecting information by transforming it into an unreadable format, called cipher text. Only those who possess a secret key can decipher (or decrypt ) the message into plain text. Encrypted messages can sometimes be broken by cryptanalysis, also called codebreaking , although modern cryptography techniques are virtually unbreakable. Database security policies are guidelines for present and future decisions regarding the maintenance of the database security. Database security mechanisms are the functions used to enforce the database security policies. There are number of security policies that can be applied on data in order to protect the data against unauthorized access. Protecting the data is the prime need of an organization.