Question

I am now working on a php project(Internet Shop) that will possibly deal with storing locally customer credit card information.
So I was thinking among other things about encrypting php files with IonCube, especially those containing settings(encryption/decryption key, IV) for
symmetric encryption algorythm. So I’m not sure if it will add an extra layer of security or not, since it appears IonCube-encrypted
files and similar solutions can be decryped.
Thank you!

Answer 1

IonCube is not a suitable solution here. If you encode a file which contains something along the lines of:

<?php $SecretValue = "xyzzy"; ?>

It’s still trivial to recover the secret value:

<?php require("encoded.secrets.php"); print $SecretValue; ?>

So the IonCube encoding is basically worthless here.