mcrypt is deprecated, what is the alternative?

Question

The mcrypt-extension is deprecated will be removed in PHP 7.2 according to the comment posted here. So I am looking for an alternative way to encrypt passwords.

Righ

Answer 1

As detailed by other answers here, the best solution I found is using OpenSSL. It is built into PHP and you don't need any external library. Here are simple examples:

To encrypt:

function encrypt($key, $payload) {
  $iv = openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(openssl_cipher_iv_length('aes-256-cbc'));
  $encrypted = openssl_encrypt($payload, 'aes-256-cbc', $key, 0, $iv);
  return base64_encode($encrypted . '::' . $iv);
}

To decrypt:

function decrypt($key, $garble) {
    list($encrypted_data, $iv) = explode('::', base64_decode($garble), 2);
    return openssl_decrypt($encrypted_data, 'aes-256-cbc', $key, 0, $iv);
}

Reference link: https://www.shift8web.ca/2017/04/how-to-encrypt-and-execute-your-php-code-with-mcrypt/