policebox

@thekeemo Encrypting email addresses at rest is generally not a good idea in web applications' databases. In fact, this is the case for any non sensitive information. If you encrypt plain text data, you loose the ability to, well, do anything databases are good for (querying, searching, etc.). From a security point of view, keep in mind that the application needs to decrypt the data in order to use it. This is not any more secure from an application security point of view. If you're worried about physical theft of your servers, you should instead encrypt your entire disk (which is safer and easier to do). In conclusion, database encryption is generally the wrong solution to the problem. Most of the time you should instead focus at making sure your application is not vulnerable to malformed input data and only safe database queries are executed. @Mr_KoKa suggested using 'deterministic encryption', which is nowadays widely regarded as a terrible idea, as is creating your own cryptosystem by adding a 'salt' ('counter'). You're better off using proper AES encryption in any mode of operation than ECB, which is what Adobe used, and no 'salt' can make it safe. In PHP, you can use mcrypt_encrypt and mcrypt_decrypt (http://php.net/manual/en/function.mcrypt-encrypt.php). I'd recommend using at least 128 bits and CBC mode. Once again -- You should not really use this in a database.

@lubblig I believe this may be a good opportunity to learn about version control. You may want to start with Git and GitHub. You may have heard of these, they are the most common version control software and web git code hosting service around respectively. There are many tutorials on the internet and GitHub has a quite nice desktop application for Windows (https://desktop.github.com/), which will make things easier. It would be very easy for you to create a GitHub account and upload your code to an online repository. Your application could have a text file, say VERSION.txt, containing the version number and this would be then automatically given the URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/username/application-name/master/VERSION.txt This will always point to the latest version of the file, no matter how many times you update your application. Your application could download the text file and compare it with its own to check whether there is a new version available. With git you can have multiple branches, e.g. a common setup includes: - master (default) for your development code, - stable for the default update channel, - beta for your alternative update channel. Finally, you get free hosting for your project using GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/). Version control, GIT in particular, is extremely handy and popular, and most programming jobs will ask for experience in it.