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What Is Colloportus

Colloportus is a single-file library for password hashing/verifying and data encryption/decryption. It is actually a simplified fork of ParagonIE’s PasswordLock, where I tried to minimize the amount of code without breaking security.

The Single-File Concept

Nowadays most developers do not care about disk space or amount of files their code takes: a JavaScript framework can take several megabytes, and it is considered normal. When installing something via Composer, a PHP library usually takes tens of files. However, I believe most libraries with a narrow feature set can be written so they contain one file per library, probably, with one or several single-file dependencies. I call this the single-file concept.

What Can Colloportus Do

Colloportus, being primarily designed for password hashing and verifying, assists in secure hashing, storing and verifying passwords provided by users. There is no backdoors, and a hashed password cannot be transformed to plain text.
However, Colloportus provides also symmetric encryption/decryption facilities since these are used in password hashing (a password is actually first hashed, then an authenticated encryption is applied).
Feel free to apply Colloportus as a hashing library for your password handling, as well as an encryption library if for some reason you need some data to be decryptable (don’t use this for passwords, they must be irreversibly hashed!).
Colloportus usually returns storable and readable data ready to be inserted into databases or configuration files.

Conclusion

I hope you get a glimpse of information about Colloportus and its use. For more detailed explanation on how to use the library, please see its Readme document.
Happy coding!