Making PHP 7.2 More Secure with LibSodium Extension - 5 Minutes Lately in PHP podcast episode 80

By Manuel Lemos

Many PHP developers still use the mcrypt extension for encrypting and decrypting data. However, that extension is based on a C library that is not being maintained anymore by its developers. PHP applications are at risk of being exposed to eventual vulnerabilities that may be discovered in mcrypt but its developers will not fix them.

A better alternative is to use the LibSodium extension proposed by the security expert Scott Arciszewski to become part of the core PHP distribution since PHP 7.2.

This was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Christian Vigh (the PHP Innovation Award Winner of the Year of 2016) on the episode 80 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

In this episode they also talked about other proposals for future PHP versions like improving the mail() function with options passed using the 5th parameter, final modifier for class constants, type hinting for static objects, using namespaces for global functions, type hinting for arrays with values of the same type .

This article also contains a podcast summary as a text transcript and a 5 minute video of the summary.

Listen to the podcast, or watch the hangout video, or read the transcript text to learn more about these interesting PHP topics.