Take the tour ×  For the field-based encryption of a database
containing sensitive information, I was thinking of the
following design:    • Every user has a smartcard used for
client certificate login.   • After login the user gets the
symmetric key (AES for example) encrypted with the public key of
his smartcard.   • The user decrypts the key and uses it to
encrypt/decrypt any sensible data on the client.  In the
database there is a table containing all the public keys of the
user smartcards and the global symmetric key encrypted with the
public key of each user. The rest of the sensitive data is
encrypted with the symmetric key.  Is the data safe if the
database gets compromised?  Another possible solution would be,
to store additionally the same global RSA key on all the
smartcards and use this key with RSA-KEM to encrypt all the
sensible data. Disadvantage would be that this makes it harder
to change the global key in the production setup as all the
smardcards would have to be replaced/reprogrammed.  Wha