Dynamic PayPal button generation - isn't it very insecure?

Question

I am just wondering here.. Aren\'t the PayPal buttons that are dynamically created, very unsecure, and easily \"hackable\"?

Like so:

Answer 1

You should use the PayPal Button API such as below:

$sendPayData = array(
    "METHOD" => "BMCreateButton",
    "VERSION" => "65.2",
    "USER" => "username",
    "PWD" => "password",
    "SIGNATURE" => "abcdefg",
    "BUTTONCODE" => "ENCRYPTED",
    "BUTTONTYPE" => "BUYNOW",
    "BUTTONSUBTYPE" => "SERVICES",
    "BUTTONCOUNTRY" => "GB",
    "BUTTONIMAGE" => "reg",
    "BUYNOWTEXT" => "BUYNOW",
    "L_BUTTONVAR1" => "item_number=$invoiceNumber",
    "L_BUTTONVAR2" => "item_name=$invoiceType",
    "L_BUTTONVAR3" => "amount=$invoiceTotal",
    "L_BUTTONVAR4" => "currency_code=GBP",
    "L_BUTTONVAR5" => "no_shipping=1",
    "L_BUTTONVAR6" => "no_note=1",
    "L_BUTTONVAR7" => "notify_url=http://www.abc.co.uk/paypal/ipn.php",
    "L_BUTTONVAR8" => "cancel_return=http://www.abc.co.uk/paypal/thanks",
    "L_BUTTONVAR9" => "return=http://www.abc.co.uk/paypal/return.php"
);

You can then send that with cURL to their API

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://api-3t.paypal.com/nvp?'.http_build_query($sendPayData));
$nvpPayReturn = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

To then generate a encrypted HTML button that cannot be edited

These links should help you with the button options:

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_nvp_BMCreateButton

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_api_ButtonMgrAPIIntro