Oracle® Web Application Programming for PL/SQL® Developers

Unit 19.3. Encrypting Sensitive Data

It is vital to keep your data confidential and secure. The obvious example is passwords; they should not be accessible to just anyone. Though HTML provides the password input type to hide manually typed passwords, until recently, Oracle did not provide any built-in functionality of its own to hide sensitive data. Though Oracle passwords have always been encrypted, occasionally an overcurious observer can see things he or she isn’t supposed to see.

Due to these types of circumstances, you may choose to obfuscate, or scramble, the data as it is stored. This way, no one is able to tell what it truly means just by merely querying the database using a simple SELECT statement. Oracle’s answer to a method for encrypting ...