Question

I need to create a simple hashing method for passing some data in a URL. It doesn’t need to be very secure, it just shouldn’t be obvious to most people.

The hash needs to contains the numerical id of the sender and the id of the recipient and I should be able to decode the data after reading the appended hash.

Any ideas? I’d like the hash to be a short as possible, simply because this url is meant to be shared via IM, email, etc..

Answer 1

Hash is one way only. If you want to decrypt it, you have to encrypt it. Try mcrypt with one of these.

For non secure stuff you can try base64_encode, You can also base_convert each numeric id from 10 to 36 digits or so. Multiplying the numbers with a secret constant could also help.

$obscurity = base_convert($recipientId * 42, 10, 36) . ':' . base_convert($senderId * 42, 10, 36)