PHP girder / News: Recent posts

PHP girder 1.0 is released.
This release is not backward compatible with previous releases as the database abstraction has been removed from PHP girder. This was done to make PHP girder more focused on its purpose for access controls and encryption and make the classes more flexible for use in other projects.

The only implementation of PHP girder 1.0 is currently in the new PHP GOBs application framework.... read more

Released a new version of Passbox based on the PHPgirder classes and the MVCbasic PHP framework. The user interface has been improved with pagination of record lists and a search feature has been incorporated into the record lists.

Fixed a bug in the installation scripts for the Codeigniter based applications and simplified the phpgirder code to make it easier to implement in other frameworks and added a database driver class to simplyfy the implementation process.

The PHP Girder CI code was updated with session naming to allow different applications to coexist on the same server.

Also implemented a display:inline; in the CSS code to resolve the IE double margin bug.

There were also some changes to the girder class to move the database connectivity and query to a seperate class file to facilitate planned changes to the database abstraction capabilities.

The changes in the PHP Girder CI code were also rolled over into the Passbox application so it will benefit from the bug fixes.

There was a bug in the Passbox example application which has been fixed, owner records were deleted when a user tried to delete a record they shared with themselves, oops.

And an option has been added to generate alphanumeric only random passwords to both the girder class files and to the Passbox example application.

There were also some minor changes to the Passbox record listings to make them easier to read, sorting and some css visual changes.

Added a new password generation function to the Passbox application so users can create strong password from within the app. Also added some CSS aesthetic changes. And there was a bug fix to the PHPgirder classes, the gssl::makephrase function was generating passwords that were 1 character longer than the requested size.

The field size for the passbox tables was restricting the size of records generated by large bit count SSL keys. I increased the varchar size from 250 to 16192 so large SSL keys shouldn't be an issue.

I also modified the sharing function so a user can revoke the keys they share with other users by deleting the share. This was important as the read only users had no way of deleting keys, now the owners who share the keys can perform the deletes.

There is now a Passbox running on the test server at http://66.219.228.11/~phpgirder/passbox/

It is configured with 512 bit SSL keys and there is a guest user with guest as the password who can create new records and a test user with the password test who can only read records.

I have created a single record with the guest user and the 512 bit SSL key at the URL below and shared that record with the test user. You can use the key from the URL below to view the records I placed in the database or generate your own key to test the application. While different keys can be used to encrypt the records in the database it is not possible to read the records unless you have the correct key.... read more

Today Passbox version 1.0 was released. It is a working example of an application that uses the PHPgirder class files on top of Codeigniter to build a secure application which implements encryption.

Passbox is used to store username and password information in SSL encrypted records. You can determine the bit length of the SSL keys used for the encryption so depending on the processing power you have on your webserver you can create encrypted records that will be safe for many years to come.... read more

I was introduced to Codeigniter as a PHP application framework and decided to implement the PHPgirder security classes on top of Codeigniter in place of the framework I was building.

You can learn more about Codeigniter and how to use it from http://www.codeigniter.com. The PHPgirder classes are implemented through a codeigniter controller named gcontroller.php. By extending this class for your own codeigniter controllers you can easily create secure applications based on PHPgirder by utilizing the functions in the gcontroller.php class. The functions in this class also simplify the utilization of the ssl encryption methods in PHPgirder in your own application.... read more

There was a bug in the install.php script table creation code. The username constraint for the userkeys table was not created in the 0.9.0a release so when a user is deleted their keys were left behind.

This is now fixed in the 0.9.1a release.

After some code clean up and some minimal documentation a first alpha release has been prepared. While this is working code the objective of this first release is to generate interest and get some code reviews and testing.

I have a test server setup to demonstrate the phpgirder framework and its capabilities. I don't yet have a domain name for it but the url is http://66.219.228.11/~phpgirder/

There is currently a basic girder site and an ejournal site. Feel free to log into either one and look around. The administrator is admin/admin and they each have a guest user with name and password guest/guest. If you try changing any passwords please change them back when you are finished. If anyone wants to try any of the functions that require the high level database username and password then send me an e-mail and I'll reply with the requested information.... read more

On Saturday the 29th 2006 the first alpha code for PHP girder was imported to CVS and a static home page was uploaded to the sourceforge servers with some basic information about the PHP girder project and API documentation for the existing class files.

http://phpgirder.sourceforge.net/

The current plan is to add some example modules into CVS, post some documentation on setting up a PHP girder application, and create an example server running the example modules. Once those tasks are completed I will begin actively recruiting assistance to clean up and debug the code to prepare it for a beta release.