PHP provide us with an interesting array of
security-oriented functionality. In this article I'll introduce you to
this functionality, provides you with a basics from which you can begin
incorporating security enhancements into your own applications.
Encrypting data with PHP
Overview: PHP
provides us with an interesting array of security-oriented
functionality, In this article I'll introduce you to this
functionality, providing you with a basis from which you can begin
incorporating security enhancements into your own applications.
Using
PHP we can easily accomplish One way encryption, In this article I will
show you how PHP can be used to do One Way encryption. PHP provides us
with built in functions to accomplish one way encryption, the most
popular functions used for these are md5() and the crypt() function, In
this article we would be using md5() to accomplish one way encryption.
Q:) Now you may ask What the heck does One way encryption mean?
A:) In the most simple terms it means, that the data that you
encrypt cannot be decrypted back to it’s original form! One-way
encryption? What's the point?" you may say Well sometimes it’s a good
idea to be not able to decrypt stuff, I know you must be thinking that
I have gone crazy, to explain my point I will give you a simple
example.
Suppose you have a site where a password is needed to access a
particular area of your site that is restricted, and you are storing
this password info in a database or a file, currently you might be
storing this password as a normal readable file, suppose tomorrow there
is a security breach the person who gets access to your database/file
can gets access to all the passwords….. not a pretty picture!
To explain you I will be using the md5() hash function, It converts
any string supplied to it into a 128bit, 32 character string. The
interesting thing about hashing is that it is impossible to decode a
message by examining the hash, because the hashed result is in no way
related to the content of the original plain text, to make it clear let
me give you an example.
Now suppose that you had encrypted the password data using PHP
md5() the hackers just gets password data something like
“648a19754f7803769c66f871bsdcd71a” which doesn’t make any sense to him
and because it is a one-way encrypted it isn't going to do much good to
a hacker because they can never be converted back to the original form.
Let assume our password is : mypass, now instead of storing this password directly we will create a hash of it using md5
<?php
$password = "mypass";
$encrypted_password = md5($password); //encrypting the password using md5()
echo "Un-encrypted Password: $password";
echo "Encrypted Password: $encrypted_password";
?>
Click on the View Sample output and notice that the encrypted
password for “mypass” is a029d0df84eb5549c641e04a9ef389e5 this
(128-bit) 32 character string has been generated by the md5() function
for mypass., What the md5() does is it generates a unique 32 character
hexadecimal number for any string supplied to it.
You can pass any string to the md5() function and it will create a unique the 32 character hexadecimal number for that string.
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