I'm reading up on MySQL because I would like to begin implementing it for greater flexibility & speed (as opposed to flat files), especially for databases that could potentially be MUCH larger than just a few hundred records (say, 100,000 or more).

My question is this: What's the best way to store these records if they contain sensitive information such as credit card numbers, names, phone numbers, etc?

The scoop is this: I'm not the only person who has a shell account on this machine which runs both Apache and MySQL (and I do not have root, though I do have some influence with the administrators). In addition, the MySQL DB login information is stored in plain text in the perl script itself right? I don't want somebody else to grab the source of my perl script (either in a shell, or with their own script executing under nobody.nogroup) thereby gaining the MySQL login/pass. Are there some sort of wrappers I should try to use? Anything?

Or if MySQL is a bad idea for this, what should I try to use?

Thanks!

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

In reply to How can I secure MySQL & CGI? by Kozz

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