Ensuring Data Security in Databases Using Format Preserving Encryption

In the current scenario data security has become an important issue with the growth of digital media. Many users and the applications are accessing the data both from inside and outside the database. Hence, the database as well as data within these databases has become the key target for most of the attackers. Many cryptographic schemes have been designed to solve this problem. Encryption plays an important role in providing the data confidentiality to data stored within the databases. But, the problem in adopting the standard encryption methods is that they may cause a damage to the existing schema as well as to the underlying applications or database as the output length is different from the input length and it also changes the format of data. This paper proposes a Format Preserving Encryption method by accumulating with Advance encryption standard(AES), eXclusive OR operation and a translation method for 16 digit numeric data. Format preserving encryption technique is used to minimizes the databases changes by preserving the format as well as the length of the input data.