Using Libsodium in PHP Projects

A guide to using the libsodium PHP extension for modern, secure, and fast cryptography. Developers can now develop fast, secure, and reliable applications without needing to know what a stream cipher even is.

This e-book is intended for PHP developers with no prior cryptography experience. To that end, this ebook will not go too in-depth to the nature of the lower-level cryptography features that each libsodium feature uses. Towards the end of each chapter, a link will be provided to other resources that explain the finer details for readers that are interested.

After reading this brief electronic manual, you should…

• Know what libsodium is, what features it has, and how to install it (both the library and the PHP extension from PECL).
• Generally understand which cryptography tool to use for a specific scenario.
• Be capable of writing production-quality code that uses libsodium.

Chapters breakdown

• Chapter 1 should explain what libsodium is, introduce some basic concepts, and guide you through installing libsodium and the PHP extension.
• Chapter 2 aims to be a useful reference page for all the functions and constants exposed by libsodium.
• Chapters 3 – 9 cover the various functions that libsodium offers, what their purpose is, and how to use them.
• Chapter 10 contains ‘recipes’: Example code that uses libsodium to satisfy a project requirement.