Needed a mechanism to be able to pass chunks of data securely from PHP to Java [...] One solution might be something "from scratch" involving mcrypt or PHP libraries like Crypt_RSA. [...] Another approach is GnuPG, either via the command line as discussed in this tutorial or via the GnuPG extension from PECL.

Option 3 is using OpenSSL and PHP's openssl_seal() function. SSL is normally used for encrypting networked communication between peers but that's not all it can do. [...] What's more - and perhaps the biggest win - it also allows us to re-use existing SSL certificates.

He uses the openssl_seal functionality on top of the EVP encrypted envelope on the certificate to handle the encrypt/decrypt of the data. Both the PHP code and Java code (and execution example) are included in the post.

Huzzah! The final release candidate of 5.2.0, RC4 is out, which means the final release is just around the corner. Given that this is a final release, this is the last chance to identify major issues or regressions. So, please test your code against this release to make sure that everything is working, and if not, let us know.

You can grab the files here:

• BZipped
• GZipped