Encrypting Cookies..

[uNF]

Hi everybody 🙂

I've just finished writing a user system for my website, and i've made it able to use cookies and/or sessions.. depending on what the user chooses.. now, i've got a problem however, see, when somebody opens up the cookie file, they get all of the info in plain text and can edit it to their liking, is there any way, using a function or something, to encrypt and then decrypt the data so any regular user wouldn't be able to edit it? I was thinking of just using MD5 or something.. but i'm wondering if there are any other suggestions that are 'tried and true' etc..

Thanks 🙂

[ahundiak]

MD5 is tried and true.

But, the best thing to do is to minimize the amount of info stored in the cookie. You really should only need to store a session id. Keep everything else on the server.