Encrypt / Decrypt Text using PHP - 16 characters or shorter

Question

I'd like to store user id's in google analytics however since they have a policy of not allowing this, I want to encrypt some text in php and be able to decrypt when needed(The User Id).

The catch is I'd like it to be as short as possible. How can I achieve this. I'm not worried at all for this to be secure. Just need to mask it some fashion.

possible duplicate of [How do you Encrypt and Decrypt a PHP String?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16600708/how-do-you-encrypt-and-decrypt-a-php-string) — Artjom B., Sep 11 '15 at 07:45

Scott Arciszewski · Answer 1 · 2015-09-11T20:39:13.150

The simple and most seure solution to encrypting URL parameters is to not encrypt them at all. Instead use a randomly generated unique value, store it in another column in the desired database table, and select based on that.

For example:

function generateToken()
{
    return strtr('+/', '-_', base64_encode(random_bytes(9)));
}

And when retrieving:

$data = $db->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE selector = ?")->execute([
    $_GET['user_token']
]);

Encrypt / Decrypt Text using PHP - 16 characters or shorter

1 Answers1