Ever wanted to securely transmit (not too long) pieces of arbitrary binary data in a URL? URLCrypt makes it easy.
This class is based on the URLCrypt from Aaron Francis and forked from https://github.com/atrapalo/URLcrypt.
URLCrypt uses 256-bit AES symmetric encryption to securely encrypt data, and encodes and decodes Base 32 strings that can be used directly in URLs.
This can be used to securely store user ids, download expiration dates and other arbitrary data like that when you access a web application from a place that doesn't have other authentication or persistence mechanisms (like cookies):
- Loading a generated image from your web app in an email
- Links that come with an expiration date (ร la S3)
- Mini-apps that don't persist data on the server
Important: As a general guideline, URL lengths shouldn't exceed about 2000 characters in length, as URLs longer than that will not work in some browsers and with some (proxy) servers. This limits the amount of data you should store with URLCrypt.
Patches are welcome; please include tests!
URLCrypt requires PHP >= 8.0 as well as the openssl PHP extension.
You can install URLCrypt via Composer with composer require dendreo/urlcrypt
or by adding the following to your composer.json
file:
{
"require": {
"dendreo/urlcrypt": "^2.0"
}
}
use Atrapalo\UrlCrypt;
$urlCrypt = new UrlCrypt(); // Or $urlCrypt = UrlCrypt::getInstance()
// encoding without encryption. (don't use for anything sensitive)
$encoded = $urlCrypt->encode('Atrapalo'); // --> "3f5h2ylqmfwg9"
$decoded = $urlCrypt->decode('3f5h2ylqmfwg9'); // --> "Atrapalo"
// encrypting and encoding
$key = 'bcb04b7e103a0cd8b54763051cef08bc55abe029fdebae5e1d417e2ffb2a00a3';
$encrypted = $urlCrypt->encrypt('Atrapalo', $key);
// --> 'xApfAdvAxg55jvk75y5n2d26xrhv3qtgfmxAmq53mf1t5'
$decrypted = $urlCrypt->decrypt('xApfAdvAxg55jvk75y5n2d26xrhv3qtgfmxAmq53mf1t5', $key)
// --> 'Atrapalo'
Note that your key has to be a lower-case hex string.
URLCrypt uses a modified Base 32 algorithm that doesn't use padding characters, and doesn't use vowels to avoid bad words in the generated string.
Base64 results in ugly URLs, since many characters need to be URL escaped.
Clone the repository and do a composer install
in the root directory of the library to install the development dependencies.
Run the tests with phpunit
from the root directory.
This library is licensed under the MIT License - see the COPYING
file for details.