> Of course not, how would you show the comments to visitors if they were encrypted? By encrypting them with a key before storing them, and decrypting them bef

> Of course not, how would you show the comments to visitors if they were encrypted? By encrypting them with a key before storing them, and decrypting them before rendering them. It's not difficult, but could put additional load on the server. Protecting access to the key would be more difficult, but it's possible with security tools. If it's a file, the idea would be to restrict access to the key to the service processes so a user on the system can't use it to encrypt their own entry. If it's an environment variable then you need to protect where that is inevitably stored and called. Then you restrict access to the database so its only accessible from specific production servers, and restrict access to the servers to only people who need the access. It's separation of duties. But I get your point about the right person being in the right position. Separation of duties goes to hell when you've got a CEO who's a developer and also works in operations. You can't restrict his write access to production data while allowing him to work on the code. Even if your processes are in place, surely the CEO of a company can get around them.