Free Encryption

Free SQL Server 2000 Encryption for your data!!! Author Michael Coles has put together a tolljit and some XPs that you can use to encrypt your data with the Blowfish algorithm. It is hard to write good applications that encrpyt data and manage the keys and security. This will give you a great headstart on protecting your data.

Easy Auditing a Shared Account

Despite the major advances made with Profiler in SQL Server 2005, auditing changes isn't one of the strengths of the product. New author Sergey Pustovit brings us his technique that allows auditing of actions using shared accounts from an application. A few minor code changes, but overall this is a very interesting idea.

You are working with SQL Server 2005 and...

You have created a certificate for MyUser with...

Keep Bad Guys at Bay with the Advanced Security Features in SQL Server

In this article I'll explore the most interesting security enhancements in SQL Server 2005 from a developer's viewpoint. I covered admin security features in the Spring 2005 issue of TechNet Magazine. But there are plenty of dev-specific security enhancements I can explore, such as endpoint authentication and support for the security context of managed code that executes on the server.

You are working with SQL Server 2005 and...

In SQL Server 2005, you can create and...

Managing the "Surface Area" of SQL Server 2005

As every developer knows by now, Microsoft has focused renewed attention on security in recent product releases. One of the important concepts in this effort is surface area. Roughly speaking, a piece of software has a smaller surface area if there are fewer ways to attack it: fewer open ports, fewer APIs, fewer protocols, and so on. OSQL Server 2005 takes this concept to the next level by letting you explicitly manage the software's surface area.

In SQL Server 2005, you can enforce various...

SQL Server 2005 Security - Part 4

In this article, we will conclude our coverage of security related changes in SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 (although we will continue discussion of improvements in other functionality areas throughout the reminder of this series). The topics we will focus on here are code and module signing, modifications of SQL Server Agent and SQL Profiler operations, as well as monitoring and auditing changes.