Encryption builtin functions in SQL Server have no known issues and, if used properly, they will produce the expected results. However, if they are used incorrectly, it can be hard to figure out what exactly is the problem, so in this post I am going...

Aaron Morton has a very interesting post and demo that show how MARS can be used to access keys temporarily opened by a procedure. This is a must-read for anyone that is interested in implementing custom restrictions around the use of encryption keys...

I often recommended to only encrypt data in SQL Server using symmetric keys and to reserve the use of asymmetric encryption for protection of symmetric keys and for signing. In this post, I will go in more detail about why asymmetric encryption is not...

This issue has been addressed before on forums, but with the heavy traffic, it can be hard to find the proper post. So, I'll provide some explanations here as well. Note: This article is written with symmetric encryption in mind, but the actual technique...