Is there a BigInteger class in PHP?

Question 1

Is there a BigInteger class in PHP? If so, how do I access it or use it?

Question 2

Hopefully helpfull links :

http://php.net/manual/en/ref.bc.php
http://php.net/manual/en/ref.gmp.php

EDIT: Math_BigInteger

Example from http://phpseclib.sourceforge.net/documentation/math.html :

Implements an arbitrary precision integer arithmetic library. Uses gmp or bcmath, if available, and an internal implementation, otherwise.

<?php
    include('Math/BigInteger.php');

    $a = new Math_BigInteger(2);
    $b = new Math_BigInteger(3);

    $c = $a->add($b);

    echo $c->toString(); // outputs 5
?>

Question 3

You can go for BCMath to work with big numbers.

Question 4

what exactly is arbitrary-precision math?
Arbitrary precision arithmetic aka "bignum math", introduces a way of performing arithmetic operations on numbers which number of digits are only limited by the amount of memory available. This is in departure with the fixed precision arithmetic which is afforded by the CPUs/ALUs of the host systems and where the maximum size/precision of the number represented is a factor of the number of bits of the registers of these hardware processors.

Fixed precision arithmetic is fast, efficient with regards to storage and it is built-in/universally available. It is however applicable to limited (if only sometimes "big enough") numerical ranges. Arbitrary precision arithmetic is slower, somewhat wasteful of the storage and requires specialized libraries such as GMP or BCMath.

what are the differences between the BCMath and GMP libraries
The most salient difference is that GMP works on [arbitrary precision] integer values, whereby BCMath allows [arbitrary precision] decimal / float-like values.
Neither API is hard to learn, but BCMath may be a bit more intuitive (in addition to support float-like values)

One's selection of a particular library over another one is typically driven by the intended use (or by the availability on a given platform). Until you get heavily into MP applications, most library will fit the bill and be generally equivalent (within its class of course, i.e. avoid integer-only library if you need floating point numbers).

what type of numbers BCMath/GMP takes?
As with most arbitrary precision math packages, these two libraries use strings for their API, i.e. to represent their input and output numeric values.
Internally... Some packages like GMP have their own representation for the numbers. The specific of such structures is typically a compromise between minimizing storage requirements and allowing fast computations (including that of "serializing/deserializing" such structures to/from text files.)
The example "x12x23x45x67" in the question is known as BCD i.e. Binary Coded Decimal. It allows storing 2 decimal digits per byte and is sometimes used by Arbitrary Precision Arithmetic libraries.

Question 5

In a word? No. There is no __equals magic method. There is a complete list of the magic methods in the manual.

You can do

$myObject1 == $myObject2

which will consider them equal if they have the same attributes and values, and are instances of the same class.

I have often wished for this type of method myself, but I think that a more useful one would be a __compare() method which would be called for any comparison operator <, >, ==, ===, etc it already exist for PHP's inbuilt classes as can be seen in the PHP internals wiki and there is an example of how it could be implemented in the PHPInternals book:-

compare_objects
int (*compare)(zval *object1, zval *object2 TSRMLS_DC)
Compares two objects. Used for the operators ==, !=, <, >, ⇐ and >=. The implementations should follow these rules – for any objects a, b and c that share the same compare handler:

One way I have used to achieve this is to implement a Comparable interface, something like:-

interface Comparable
{
    /**
     * @param Comparable $other
     * 
     * @return Int -1, 0 or 1 Depending on result of comparison
     */
    public function compareTo(Comparable $other);
}

The details of object comparison, and everything else OOP related can be found here http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.php.

~~This may be implemented in PHP 7.~~

There is now an implementation of this that you can install using composer. https://github.com/Fleshgrinder/php-comparable

Question 6

"I was wondering if there is an even better way to hash passwords in PHP 7+ then password_hash. Is password_hash good enough?"

Yes it is safe enough, and yes there is a better/safer way. As of PHP 7.2, Argon2 is part of a newly implemented (hashing) method that won the Password Hashing Competition which offers a more robust method, should you want to upgrade your version of PHP to 7.2.

The wiki on this states:

Argon2, the recommended password hashing algorithm by the Password Hashing Competition, is a modern algorithm for securely hashing passwords. Argon2 addresses several key downsides of existing algorithms in that it is designed for the highest memory filling rate, and effective use multiple computing units while still providing defense against tradeoff attacks. Unlike Bcrypt, which just takes a single cost factor, Argon2 is parameterized by three distinct factors:

A memory cost that defines memory usage of the algorithm

A time cost that defines the execution time of the algorithm and the number of iterations

And a parallelism factor, which defines the number of parallel threads

You can also look into the following link which contains more information on Libsodium https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/02/how-safely-store-password-in-2016

The manual on http://php.net/manual/en/function.password-hash.php also contains information on PASSWORD_ARGON2I.

The changelog states:

7.2.0 Support for Argon2 passwords using PASSWORD_ARGON2I was added.

If upgrading to PHP 7.2 is not an option, then you could increase the "cost".

Pulled from this answer and from the related post Generating Password Hash In PHP 5.5 And Setting Cost Option, and I quote:

Increasing the cost parameter by 1, doubles the needed time to calculate the hash value. The cost parameter is the logarithm (base-2) of the iteration count, that means:

$iterations = 2 ^ $cost;

You can also consult this other Q&A here on :

How does password_hash really work?

Is there a BigInteger class in PHP?

Answers

php,biginteger