Tips on signed cookies instead of sessions

Question

I\'m considering ditching PHP\'s $_SESSION (i.e. the server-side session handling, to add some language-agnostic flavor) and using signed cookies instead, since

Answer 1

I made CookieStorage exactly for this purpose. All stored values are securely signed with your private key via RIPEMD160 hashing (and salted with time), and optionally encrypted with RIJNDAEL256.

Each value is stored with the timestamp, which is retrievable.

Signed example.
Encrypted example.

If you prefer, you can use the hash/encrypt/decrypt functions of your choice.