Rants of a Jester...

Lately I needed to encrypt some data: in this case username, password, and credit card data. It them hit me that there exists. I knew that I'd be reusing the encryption settings, so why not make some external API to do all that work for me so that all I have to do is say: "Hey, encrypt this!", or "Hey, decrypt this!".

Enter the "Cipher" module. It is a basic module that basically gives a developer an API to work with via a class to do basic encryption/description. Here's a little snippet of how it works:

Say that I want to have a password field stored encrypted in a database. The insertion happened on the myform_submit hook. So, in the form, I would do something to the following effect:

function myform_submit($form_id, $form_values) {
$cipher = new PontoCipher(variable_get('mymodule_cipher_key', ''));
$form_values['password'] = $cipher->encrypt($form_values['password']);
db_query("INSERT INTO {table} VALUES('%s', '%s')", $form_values['username'], $form_values['password']);
return;
}

Now, what just happened? Well, on the first line, we created the $cipher object. You will notice that we gave the constructor a "cipher_key". This is the 'key' that is used for encryption. By default, the cipher module uses your drupal installs site key if one is not given. However, your module could use a totally different key.
Next, we asked the cipher to encrypt the values. We then inserted the ENCRYPTED information into the database.

To decrypt, we would create the cipher object as object, and give the function decrypt the encrypted information. The function will return the decrypted string value of the information given.

This is the start of a module that could have a lot of potential. Hopefully someone finds it of use.