Just thought I'd give an update about the current status of the Crypto++ 
extension for PHP I've been working on the past month or two, called simply 
cryptopp.

The extension is coming along rather nicely and is stablizing towards a 
solid release. I'd still consider the current releases of beta quality and 
not to be trusted with 100% confidence, although I have not had a problem 
yet. (As more users try out the extension, I'll get a better idea of how 
well it's working, but I need feedback, which sadly has been slow-coming.)

The good stuff:

- Works on a bunch of platforms, including both UNIX platforms (Solaris 8 
and linux tested; others should work if gcc/g++ work) and Windows platforms 
(Windows 2000 with VC++ 6 tested). Hopefully this will be of use to Windows 
PHP users, as I don't believe the win32 port of the libmcrypt libraries are 
being maintained anymore.

- The extension implements 32 cryptographic ciphers (27 block ciphers, 5 
stream ciphers), 14 cryptographic hashes and two checksum hashes. (CRC32 is 
included for completeness, even though there is already a CRC32 function in 
PHP.) 

- There is some compatibility with the mcrypt and mhash extensions. I 
haven't tested everything, but there are at least a few algorithms common 
to each that can produce compatible ciphertext.

- There's a set of C bindings to the extension that you can use in other 
extensions. I guess. I had originally used the C bindings in the extension 
itself until I wised up. I left them there for others to use if they really 
want to. (The extension is written in C++, so the C bindings were 
originally to make using the C++ classes from PHP's C code easier.)


The bad:

- produces a big-ass executable when statically linked with PHP. My current 
Apache executable went from 3.3 MB or so to 5.3 MB after enabling the 
extension. VC++ 6 produces a DLL of 430 KB or so. This is 'cause unlike 
mcrypt and mhash there's no dynamic loading of ciphers or hashes. (Yet -- I 
may work on this later.)

- there's no way to pick and choose which ciphers or hashes you'd like to 
compile in with the extension -- it's all or nothing. I'm also planning on 
working on this later.


The latest version of the extension is 0.0.5. There were a few changes from 
the original version, 0.0.1, which are listed in the docs. To play around 
with the extension, head to http://www.tutorbuddy.com/software/. (Mirrored 
at http://209.202.82.229/software/.)

J


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