Once you have established an appropriate cryptography policy for your application, including the necessary key values and algorithms, you can begin to apply encryption and decryption to your data. However, you must also thoroughly plan the role that cryptography plays in your application in order to use it safely and effectively. While ABL provides powerful tools for generating keys and encrypting data, you must manage these tools carefully in your application to avoid serous problems that could result in loss of data.
Caution: Before encrypting any data that you intend to have decrypted, be certain that you can recover the unencrypted data if either the encryption or decryption fails.
For more information, in general, on managing data encryption and decryption, see the Security whitepaper prepared by OpenEdge Marketing, which can be found on the PSDN Web site.
