You don’t have to be hiding NSA secret documents to feel like you should secure your website from unwanted intruders. PHP built-in encryption/encoding functions let you achieve a very decent level of security to protect your data. The purpose of this post is to explain what kind of data you should secure and how to do so (in a beginner’s programming level).

What kind of data do I need to Secure?

Fortunately you don’t have to encrypt every single data you exchange with your server. The most common secure transmission involves passwords. When a user registers or logs into your site you want to work with data he submitted in an encoded form so that no one (even you!) can read the raw values.