The ability to sign procedures is my favorite cryptographic feature in SQL Server 2005. If we want to write a procedure that requires permission P, and we want Alice to be able to execute the procedure but we do not want to grant her the permission...

I modified the last column encryption demo by protecting the encryption key with a certificate instead of using a password. The advantage to this approach is that a password is no longer needed when opening the key. The advantage of the password approach...

A while ago, I answered a question about how to find out what keys are encrypted by a certificate. Since then, I compiled a list of useful queries that can be used to find out the encryptions and signatures made with a cryptographic entity. Before listing...

For my first post, I decided to make available a very simple demo I wrote recently to demonstrate how data can be encrypted in SQL Server 2005. You can paste the following script in SSMS and execute it line by line while following the comments. The script...