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Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 09:48:07 -0500
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Subject: Authenticated Encryption in PHP
From: admin@codeangel.org (Chad Emrys)

Hello,

I was wondering how difficult it would be to add access to a standard 
authenticated encryption mode in openssl.  I was looking and trying to 
figure out how to do this in PHP, seems you have to do it the old 
fashioned way that's way too prone to error, basically encrypt and mac 
yourself.  This has been shown to be really easy to mess up, but now we 
have standards such as GCM, CCM, and EAX.  GCM seems to be the popular 
choice since it's the fastest, unencumbered by patents, and adopted by 
NIST.   (Also personally like GCM, because that's also what the JCE went 
with and I have interest in using encryption between Java and PHP).  It 
seems openssl lib in C does have support for GCM, so I was wondering how 
difficult would it be to offer such cipher options in PHP's openssl 
functions such as "aes-128-gcm" etc...  Possibly throwing an error when 
the tag fails (or maybe something better, as if the user has display 
errors on, there have been known attacks letting an attacker know if the 
tag failed vs other reasons decryption failed).

Chad