On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to use the Halite package to encrypt the contents of emails. The Halite library sits on top of the libsodium functionality to provide tested, hardened cryptographic results.

Cryptography is a complex matter. In fact, there is one golden rule: "Don’t implement cryptography yourself." The reason for this is that so many things can go wrong while implementing it, the slightest error can generate a vulnerability and if you look away, your precious data can be read by someone else.

[...] Some libraries out there implement cryptography primitives and operations, and leave a lot of decisions to the developer. [...] Nevertheless, there is one library that stands out from the rest for its simplicity and takes a lot of responsibility from the developer on the best practices, in addition to using the libsodium library. In this article we are going to explore Halite.

The tutorial then starts of helping you get the libsodium package installed on your system (assuming it's unix-based). They then start on the sample application - a basic "email" client able to send/receive messages between users. They set up RESTful endpoints to get the messages, use the Doctrine ORM for a database interface and show the use of the Halite Crypto class to encrypt/decrypt the message contents.

On the Paragon Initiative site there's a new post that promises a way to solve all of your cryptography problems in PHP with three simple steps.

Last year, we began developing Halite, a FOSS high-level wrapper for the PHP bindings to libsodium. We use Halite extensively in our own projects (including our upcoming CMS which has quite a few of its own innovative cryptography features baked-in).

As of version 2.1.0, we are confident that Halite solves all of the application-layer cryptography problems that most PHP developers face; and it does so in three easy steps. (For transport-layer cryptography, you should still use TLS, of course.)

Their three steps to effectively using Halite and libsodium in your application are:

• Step One: Managing Cryptography Keys
• Step Two: Encrypting or Authenticating with Halite
• Step Three: Decrypt or Verify

Each step comes with example code showing how to use the tool to accomplish it. There's also a few other problems that are solved by using the library including generating encrypted password hashes and whole file cryptography.