1) The mcrypt module has been deprecated with PHP 7.1.
What does that mean for the encryption filters?
2) deriving the IV from the secret passphrase seems wrong. This leaks information about the passphrase without need.
3) using md5() for this? Really? hash() has been available since PHP 5.1.2.
4) hashing the passphrase twice does not add any security.
5) using substr() on binary data (why, oh why, is true passed to md5()?) might lead to headaches if mbstring.func_overload is used.
Encryption Filters
mcrypt.* and mdecrypt.*
provide symmetric encryption and decryption using libmcrypt.
Both sets of filters support the same algorithms available to
mcrypt extension in the form of
mcrypt.ciphername where ciphername
is the name of the cipher as it would be passed to
mcrypt_module_open().
The following five filter parameters are also available:
| Parameter | Required? | Default | Sample Values |
|---|---|---|---|
| mode | Optional | cbc | cbc, cfb, ecb, nofb, ofb, stream |
| algorithms_dir | Optional | ini_get('mcrypt.algorithms_dir') | Location of algorithms modules |
| modes_dir | Optional | ini_get('mcrypt.modes_dir') | Location of modes modules |
| iv | Required | N/A | Typically 8, 16, or 32 bytes of binary data. Depends on cipher |
| key | Required | N/A | Typically 8, 16, or 32 bytes of binary data. Depends on cipher |
Example #1 Encrypting file output using 3DES
<?php
$passphrase = 'My secret';
/* Turn a human readable passphrase
* into a reproducable iv/key pair
*/
$iv = substr(md5('iv'.$passphrase, true), 0, 8);
$key = substr(md5('pass1'.$passphrase, true) .
md5('pass2'.$passphrase, true), 0, 24);
$opts = array('iv'=>$iv, 'key'=>$key);
$fp = fopen('secret-file.enc', 'wb');
stream_filter_append($fp, 'mcrypt.tripledes', STREAM_FILTER_WRITE, $opts);
fwrite($fp, 'Secret secret secret data');
fclose($fp);
?>
Example #2 Reading an encrypted file
<?php
$passphrase = 'My secret';
/* Turn a human readable passphrase
* into a reproducable iv/key pair
*/
$iv = substr(md5('iv'.$passphrase, true), 0, 8);
$key = substr(md5('pass1'.$passphrase, true) .
md5('pass2'.$passphrase, true), 0, 24);
$opts = array('iv'=>$iv, 'key'=>$key);
$fp = fopen('secret-file.enc', 'rb');
stream_filter_append($fp, 'mdecrypt.tripledes', STREAM_FILTER_READ, $opts);
$data = rtrim(stream_get_contents($fp));
fclose($fp);
echo $data;
?>
add a note
User Contributed Notes 2 notes
Uwe Ohse ¶
7 years ago
Maarten Bodewes ¶
7 years ago
The examples on this page should be destroyed with utmost urgency.
Strangely most people will fall over the use of generating the IV and 3DES key using MD5, a weak hash function, e.g. the previous note and CryptoFails blog.
http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70059608390/php-documentation-woes
A password based key derivation function should be used (bcrypt, PBKDF2).
However the use of MD-5 for key derivation however isn't that bad and if the password is strong enough (it usually isn't) then the generated DES ABC key is strong enough even now.
Using an identical IV for each password means that this function directly leaks information about the encrypted file. If the start of two encrypted files is identical then this function will directly leak information. For instance, if the routine encrypts multiple images then the JPEG header would be easily distinguished.
All in all these examples use deprecated routines (mcrypt), deprecated cryptographic functions (MD5 / DES) and then incorrectly perform the actual encryption. Enough reason to destroy them in the first place.
