url encryption

Anon

anyone know a way to encrypt a url string with php or otherwise?

any help is appreciated.

Anon

You can encrypt it with mcrypt, base64 encode the binary result and then rawurlencode the value in the query string.

Anon

thanks, still need a little more direction:

I am calling the url through the header function:

header("Location: http://www.domain.com/tmp/$file");

it is the www.domain.com that I need to encrypt. Now this link goes to download a file so basically I don't want the user to not be able to see what domain they are downloading from.

will the mcrypt function still work in this scenario?

Anon

what I meant there was, basically I don't want the user to be able to see what domain they are downloading from.

Anon

You could send an appropriate content-type header and readfile() the content of the URL to their browser.

Anon

ok, could you maybe give me a generic code example of that process? I don't quite get how that would be executed.

thank you muchly for your time.

kparker

www.domain.com that I need to encrypt.

Of course you can't encrypt the domain name--how will the poor browser know what server to connect to?

kparker

See the following for a good example of how to use header() and the passthrough functions to send binary content to the user w/o the user being able to see the underlying filename. (Indeed, the file itself can be stored outside the webserver document tree.)

www.phpbuilder.com/forum/read.php3?num=2&id=101552&loc=0&thread=101552

Anon

header("Content-Type: application/zip");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=somefile.zip");
readfile("http://www.secretsite.com/file.zip");
exit;

Anon

that worked quite well, thanks for your time.

One last question:

Do you know what the other "Content-Disposition:" descriptions are? Is there somewhere I could find that info...