Access™ 2007 VBA Programmer's Reference

3.10. Security

Security comes in a multitude of wrappers—some are from Access and others are from servers and network settings. For many companies, the best way to protect data is to store it on a server, such as SharePoint or SQL Server and then use the network and server settings to control access.

Access 2007 has additional options for both data and file protection. The ACCDB file format enables data encryption. This form of data protection is far superior to anything previously available in user and group security features. With an ACCDB file, the data, itself, is protected by encryption rather than relying on restricting access to specific users and groups. Access also utilizes trust center settings to determine if a database is trusted or will open in disabled mode. With tighter virus protection controls, trust center use makes it easier for developers to deploy VBA powered solutions. Chapter 18 discusses security measures and options for both MDB and ACCDB file formats. Unless system administrators have established other policies, users still have the opportunity to enable an untrusted database opened from an untrusted location. That's covered briefly later and in more detail in Chapter 22.

3.10.1. Encryption with Database Password

After years of humbly conceding that the security features in Access were more about permissions than protection, developers can finally claim that Access can preserve and protect the data. With the ACCDB file format, Access 2007 uses the Windows ...