Cryptographer

A Craft CMS plugin that adds Twig filters to encrypt and decrypt content via URL-safe strings. Useful for situations such as:

• Generating single-use URLs, such as for private pages
• Masking numeric IDs like 521 as strings, as in youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
• Generating URLs for users or entries without revealing their usernames, slugs or IDs

Contents

• Usage
  • Secure Encryption
  • Masking Numbers
  • Legacy Methods
• Configuration
• Installation
• Requirements
• Changelog
• Contributors
• License

Usage

Cryptographer offers two broad options to transform data into ciphertext, and back from ciphertext to original data. One is cryptographically secure and based on Craft's security component (which is in turn based on Yii's). The other is not secure and based on the popular Hashids library. Both options produce URL-safe strings.

Secure Encryption

Use this method to encrypt sensitive information. It differs from the native encenc filter in that the output is always a URL-safe string. Note that the cipher generated each time will be different. So this is good for generating single use tokens, but not a good candidate for generating permanent URLs.

Templating

{{ 'Sensitive data' | encrypt }}
{{ 'Y3J5cHQ64Q8YoiXmSUYq6c2mcg6YjmVjNTBkNGViNmE4M2FiNTVmYTdkZTUyYjJhZmNjNzY5NWRiNDc5M2ExNzRhZTE1ZWZmMjU2NzFkMDNhMzEyZWIX9Rj4f4vOKB2XCljjXha3aKfJw4c6D-T7zMoXhKpeFw=='
   | decrypt }}

API

$ciphertext = \miranj\cryptographer\Plugin::getInstance()->cryptographer->encrypt('Sensitive data');
$originaltext = \miranj\cryptographer\Plugin::getInstance()->cryptographer->decrypt($ciphertext);

Masking Numbers

Important: This method should not be considered cryptographically secure. Avoid using it for encoding sensitive data like passwords.

This method converts numbers like 457 into strings like 'qan8deK8'. Use this method to mask numbers such as element IDs (or a list of IDs) for use inside URLs. It is a wrapper for the popular Hashids library.

Templating

{{ user.id | maskNumbers }}
{{ 'qan8deK8' | unmaskNumbers }}

API

$mask = \miranj\cryptographer\Plugin::getInstance()->cryptographer->maskNumbers([521]);
$numbers = \miranj\cryptographer\Plugin::getInstance()->cryptographer->unmaskNumbers('qan8deK8');

Legacy Methods

Important: This method should not be considered cryptographically secure. Avoid using it for encoding sensitive data like passwords.

Cryptographer provides a third method of masking and unmasking strings which is deprecated in v1.x. It is offerred purely for backwards compatibility of sites that were using the Craft 2 version of this plugin (v0.x) and have content that needs to be converted back to the original.

maskLegacy

{{ 'Do not use for sensitive data' | maskLegacy }}
{{ 'Do not use for sensitive data' | maskLegacy | url_encode }}
{{ 'Do not use for sensitive data' | maskLegacy('AES-128-CFB') }}

This filter takes two optional arguments.

• $method — Cipher method to be used. Possible methods can be determined using openssl_get_cipher_methods(). By default the AES-256-CBC method is used.
• $iv — The initialisation vector. If no initialisation vector is provided, a random value is used every time.

unmaskLegacy

{{ '66e46cfa6029c1484jTssikEhQXOk4BvYXWfu1M82R3Ifh1kVxQYmxoGwKc=' | unmaskLegacy }}
{{ '9b3c72940c8318b7dGbekO6uMVIAxk7UFA1f0A5tTuoqBo1Vn0jRb3ZjN54=' | unmaskLegacy('AES-128-CBC') }}

This filter takes one optional argument.

• $method — Cipher method to be used. Possible methods can be determined using openssl_get_cipher_methods(). By default the AES-256-CBC method is used.

Configuration

To configue Cryptographer, create a cryptographer.php file in your config/ folder, which returns an array. This file supports Craft's standard multi-environment configurations.

Here is a sample config file along with a list of all possible settings and their default values:

<?php

return [
    // hashids
    'hashidsMinLength' => 15,   // pad output to fit at least a certain length
    'hashidsAlphabet' => null,  // use a custom alphabet, eg: 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
    
    // legacy
    'secret' => null,           // defaults to using Craft's securityKey
];

• hashidsMinLength – Configure Hashids to ensure the output is of a certain length. The resultant string may not be exactly of this length, but will not be shorter than this number.

• hashidsAlphabet – Use a custom alphabet to generate the output string. The default alphabet used by Hashids is 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890'.

• secret – A private, cryptographically-secure key that is used for encrypting and decrypting data. Default value is null, in which case the plugin uses securityKey from Craft's general config.

  This setting is retained for legacy reasons only, i.e. if you are migrating a Craft 2 website. It should only be explicity set when you need to decrypt ciphers generated by the Craft 2 version of this plugin. Copy over the value from Settings > Plugins > Cryptographer > Secret before migrating from Craft 2.

Installation

You can install this plugin from the Plugin Store or with Composer.

From the Plugin Store

Go to the Plugin Store in your project’s Control Panel and search for “Cryptographer”. Then click on the “Install” button in its modal window.

Using Composer

Open your terminal and run the following commands:

# go to the project directory
cd /path/to/project

# tell composer to use the plugin
composer require miranj/craft-cryptographer

# tell Craft to install the plugin
./craft plugin/install cryptographer

Requirements

This plugin requires Craft CMS 3, 4, or 5. The Craft 2 version is availabe in the v0 branch.

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Brought to you by Miranj