Encryption/Decryption

Phalcon provides encryption facilities via the Phalcon\Crypt component. This class offers simple object-oriented wrappers to the mcrypt PHP’s encryption library.

By default, this component provides secure encryption using AES-256 (rijndael-256-cbc).

Basic Usage

This component is designed to provide a very simple usage:

<?php

use Phalcon\Crypt;

// Create an instance
$crypt     = new Crypt();

$key       = 'le password';
$text      = 'This is a secret text';

$encrypted = $crypt->encrypt($text, $key);

echo $crypt->decrypt($encrypted, $key);

You can use the same instance to encrypt/decrypt several times:

<?php

use Phalcon\Crypt;

// Create an instance
$crypt = new Crypt();

$texts = array(
    'my-key'    => 'This is a secret text',
    'other-key' => 'This is a very secret'
);

foreach ($texts as $key => $text) {

    // Perform the encryption
    $encrypted = $crypt->encrypt($text, $key);

    // Now decrypt
    echo $crypt->decrypt($encrypted, $key);
}

Encryption Options

The following options are available to change the encryption behavior:

Name	Description
Cipher	The cipher is one of the encryption algorithms supported by libmcrypt. You can see a list here
Mode	One of the encryption modes supported by libmcrypt (ecb, cbc, cfb, ofb)

Example:

<?php

use Phalcon\Crypt;

// Create an instance
$crypt = new Crypt();

// Use blowfish
$crypt->setCipher('blowfish');

$key   = 'le password';
$text  = 'This is a secret text';

echo $crypt->encrypt($text, $key);

Base64 Support

In order for encryption to be properly transmitted (emails) or displayed (browsers) base64 encoding is usually applied to encrypted texts:

<?php

use Phalcon\Crypt;

// Create an instance
$crypt   = new Crypt();

$key     = 'le password';
$text    = 'This is a secret text';

$encrypt = $crypt->encryptBase64($text, $key);

echo $crypt->decryptBase64($encrypt, $key);

Setting up an Encryption service

You can set up the encryption component in the services container in order to use it from any part of the application:

<?php

use Phalcon\Crypt;

$di->set('crypt', function () {

    $crypt = new Crypt();

    // Set a global encryption key
    $crypt->setKey('%31.1e$i86e$f!8jz');

    return $crypt;
}, true);

Then, for example, in a controller you can use it as follows:

<?php

use Phalcon\Mvc\Controller;

class SecretsController extends Controller
{
    public function saveAction()
    {
        $secret = new Secrets();

        $text = $this->request->getPost('text');

        $secret->content = $this->crypt->encrypt($text);

        if ($secret->save()) {
            $this->flash->success('Secret was successfully created!');
        }
    }
}