Iron-Clad Java

CHAPTER6

Protecting Sensitive Data

Credit card numbers. Social Security numbers. Passwords. Secret recipes for sugar water. Eventually your application will need to handle sensitive information. Whether you are writing the data to a file, storing it in a database, or sending it across the network, your code needs to keep the information secure. In this chapter, we cover techniques to keep data safe from prying eyes.

Before digging into those techniques, let’s first set the stage by reviewing the threats that you need to block. Most people immediately think about the danger of an eavesdropper harvesting confidential data as it passes over a network. ...