This month, we dive into Libsodium, discuss gatekeeping, learn more about data access, and why even something that might be considered a “small bug” can cause massive damage.

According to the just-released 2021 version of OWASP Top 10 (a curated list of the most critical web application security risks out there), “Cryptographic Failures” are the 2nd most important of the many security concerns we should have as web developers. These concerns include a lot of misuses of cryptographic systems, like choosing weak algorithms, […]

Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.—Robin Sharma PHP Architect is going through change, and we hope you follow us for the adventure.

If you ask a group of programmers the most difficult topics they think there is in the area, there will be a lot of different responses, depending on which language they use and how skilled they are. Dynamic memory allocation, concurrency, coroutines, compiler optimizations are just some examples of those answers. I do hope I’m […]

The goal of any encryption operation is to scramble the patterns in the plaintext source data and otherwise protect its contents by rendering a specific message indistinguishable from random noise. A cryptographically-secure algorithm or implementation is one that can be mathematically proven to render data in such a state—there is no mathematical way to analyze […]

While not commonly seen in the wild, PHP exposes powerful interfaces empowering applications to manipulate large streams of data directly. Both stream wrappers and filters allow developers to interact with objects too large to fit in memory or which might be ephemeral in nature. Combining these stream interfaces opens up even more possibilities for the […]

Computers are deterministic by nature, so we need to leverage purpose-built random number generators to introduce unpredictability into the system.

Cryptographic primitives we discussed at a hackathon were hashes, and it’s useful to take a more in-depth look at what they are and how to use them in PHP.

The basics can be tricky. This month we take a careful walk-through of a few lines of cryptographic code in PHP. This leads us through the difference between ones’ complement and two’s complement representation. We achieve weirdness by combining logical AND with integer addition.