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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2016 19:55:46 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] PHP 7.1 - Simple Cryptography Interface
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

On 10/01/2016 04:23, Scott Arciszewski wrote:
> I'd like to make cryptography drop-dead simple in PHP 7.1 and
> thereafter. The simplest thing to do is to provide a simple front-end
> API, designed for human usability, that abstracts away the
> complexities of cryptography engineering.

I'm absolutely in favour of the sentiment behind this, but I'd like to 
clarify the exact audience and use-cases you are targeting.

The severely limited set of proposed algorithms sounds great for someone 
who just wants to implement a single crypto scenario for internal use 
(although in that case things will need to be very well documented - as 
a non-expert, I would not know when to use seal() vs encrypt() vs 
aeadEncrypt() for instance). The custom "ciphertext message format" also 
implies that the intention is only to store these messages for use on 
another PHP system with the same configuration.

However, some of the time the cryptography work people want to do is to 
interact with other systems. These might require selection of specific 
algorithms, which might not be the latest and greatest, but still need 
to be implemented somewhere. It would be odd if I wanted to implement, 
say, OAuth or XML-Sig, and there were no functions under \Php\Crypto\ to 
help me with that.

Previous discussions have described something more like PDO, which is 
intended as a simplified abstraction toolkit, rather than a 
crypto-for-dummies. I think there's a case for both things, but it would 
be interesting to think about how they might be related.

Regards,

-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]