Important Security Information

If you're going to use JCrypt in any of your extensions, make sure you use CryptoCipher or SodiumCipher; These are the only two which are cryptographically secure.

use Joomla\CMS\Crypt\Cipher\SodiumCipher;

$cipher = new SodiumCipher;
$key    = $cipher->generateKey();
$data   = 'My encrypted data.';

$cipher->setNonce(\Sodium\randombytes_buf(\Sodium\CRYPTO_BOX_NONCEBYTES));

$encrypted = $cipher->encrypt($data, $key);
$decrypted = $cipher->decrypt($encrypted, $key);

if ($decrypted !== $data)
{
    throw new RuntimeException('The data was not decrypted correctly.');
}

use Joomla\CMS\Crypt\Cipher\CryptoCipher;

$cipher = new CryptoCipher();
$key = $cipher->generateKey(); // Store this for long-term use

$message = "We're all living on a yellow submarine!";
$ciphertext = $cipher->encrypt($message, $key);
$decrypted = $cipher->decrypt($ciphertext, $key);

Avoid these Ciphers if Possible

• JCryptCipher3Des
• JCryptCipherBlowfish
• JCryptCipherMcrypt
• JCryptCipherRijndael256

All of these ciphers are vulnerable to something called a chosen-ciphertext attack. The only provable way to prevent chosen-ciphertext attacks is to use authenticated encryption, preferrably in an Encrypt-then-MAC construction.

The only JCrypt cipher that meets the authenticated encryption criteria is JCryptCipherCrypto.

Absolutely Avoid JCryptCipherSimple

JCryptCipherSimple is deprecated and will be removed in Joomla 4. It's vulnerable to a known plaintext attack: If you know any information about the plaintext (e.g. the first character is '<'), an attacker can recover bits of the encryption key with ease.

If an attacker can influence the message, they can actually steal your encryption key. Here's how:

1. Feed str_repeat('A', 256) into your application, towards JCryptCipherSimple.
2. Observe the output of the cipher (the ciphertext).
3. Run it through this code:

function recoverJcryptCipherSimpleKey($ciphertext, $knownPlaintext)
{
    $key = '';
    for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($knownPlaintext); ++$i) {
      $key.= chr(ord($ciphertext[$i]) ^ ord($knownPlaintext[$i]));
    }
}

$key = recoverJcryptCipherSimpleKey(
    $someEncryptedTextOutput,
    str_repeat('A', 256)
);

Given how trivial it is to steal the encryption key from this cipher, you absolutely should not use it.