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People familiar with AES will no doubt wonder why the functions don't include an argument for an initialization vector (IV). The MD5 hashing doesn't increase the security of the encryption if an attacker uses the BaseElements plugin to try and guess the key. Despite the wonderful user-friendliness here, we strongly recommend you use a key of sufficient length and randomness, such as a UUID. My understanding is that the plugin will take whatever you pass as the key, MD5 hash it and use of first 256 bits of the hash as the real key, guaranteeing that the key is always 256 bits (AES-256 requires 256-bit keys). From a functionality perspective, the length of the key doesn't matter: the plugin will work no matter how long the key is. You must use the same key you used to encrypt.
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The opposite of encrypting, decrypting takes the encrypted string and outputs back the original piece of text. The function outputs the results as a Base64-encoded string, so it can be stored in a text field. AES is an industry-standard encryption algorithm developed by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST). Does what it says on the tin: it encrypts a piece of text using the AES-256 bit encryption algorithm. If you have a FileMaker system that could benefit from a tighter security policy, contact us to discuss helping you add encryption to your system using the BaseElements plugin. Encrypting at the field level prevents unauthorized users from accessing sensitive data in open FileMaker files, whether that be from exporting records, checking out a field value in Data Viewer, or accidentally stumbling upon a developer layout displaying the field.
#FILEMAKER BASEELEMENTS PRO#
Encrypting the entire database at rest, using FileMaker Pro 13 Advanced's new file-level encryption, is also important in protecting sensitive data, but will not help you once a user has the database open.
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The new encryption functionality in the BaseElements plugin allows you to securely store sensitive data, such as credit card numbers and SSNs (ideally you wouldn't store this data, but if need be, encryption is an important component of PCI and HIPAA compliance). The latest beta version of the BaseElements plugin (2.3 as of ) now includes a set of AES encryption functions that can be used to encrypt text fields in a FileMaker database. So, as history tends to do, we repeated ourselves by sponsoring the development of the plugin again, but this time for encryption functions. Just as we've needed HTTP POST many times over the years, we've also needed field-level encryption. Since then, we've used the HTTP POST functions in many web service integrations and are thankful for Goya's continued contributions to the FileMaker community with this Swiss-army-knife-esque, open-source plugin. In fact we love it so much we decided to sponsor the development of HTTP POST in the plugin back at the beginning of 2012. We here at DB Services love the BaseElements plugin.