I have a string that I would like to encrypt in Python, store it as a cookie, then in a PHP file I'd like to retrieve that cookie, and decrypt it in PHP. How would I go about doing this?
I appreciate the fast responses.
All cookie talk aside, lets just say I want to encrypt a string in Python and then decrypt a string in PHP.
Are there any examples you can point me to?
Well, my first thought would be to use a web server that uses SSL and set the cookie's secure property to true, meaning that it will only be served over SSL connections.
However, I'm aware that this probably isn't what you're looking for.
Use a standard encryption scheme. The implementation is going to be equivalent in either language.
RSA is available (via third party libraries) in both languages, if you need asymmetric key crypto. So is AES, if you need symmetric keys.
If you're not talking about encryption but encoding to make sure the contents make it through safely regardless of quoting issues, special characters, and line breaks, I think base64 encoding is your best bet. PHP has base64_encode / decode() out of the box, and I'm sure Python has, too.
Note that base64 encoding obviously does nothing to encrypt your data (i.e. to make it unreadable to outsiders), and base64 encoded data grows by 33%.
There is a good example here:
http://www.codekoala.com/blog/2009/aes-encryption-python-using-pycrypto/
Other links that may help:
http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/4238.html
http://www.chilkatsoft.com/p/php_aes.asp