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, $key);
Avoid these Ciphers if Possible
JCryptCipher3Des
JCryptCipherBlowfish
JCryptCipherMcrypt
JCryptCipherRijndael256
All of these ciphers are vulnerable to something called a chosen-ciphertext attack. The only provable way to prevent chosen-ciphertext attacks is to use authenticated encryption, preferrably in an Encrypt-then-MAC construction.
The only JCrypt cipher that meets the authenticated encryption criteria is JCryptCipherCrypto
.
Absolutely Avoid JCryptCipherSimple
JCryptCipherSimple
is deprecated and will be removed in Joomla 4. It's vulnerable to a known plaintext attack: If you know any information about the plaintext (e.g. the first character is '<'), an attacker can recover bits of the encryption key with ease.
If an attacker can influence the message, they can actually steal your encryption key. Here's how:
- Feed
str_repeat('A', 256)
into your application, towardsJCryptCipherSimple
. - Observe the output of the cipher (the ciphertext).
- Run it through this code:
function recoverJcryptCipherSimpleKey($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.