Shift8 GEO IP Location

Try clearing all cookies and re-visit the website. Then examine the cookies set by the website in your browser. The cookie name should be “shift8_geoip”.

The plugin will set the cookie after successful geolocation and encrypt the value using OpenSSL with wp_salt(‘auth’) as a key. This means in order to access the geolocation data you have to write code (in functions.php for example) such as the following :

$cookie_data = explode('_', shift8_geoip_decrypt(wp_salt('auth'), $_COOKIE['shift8_geoip']));

The cookie data when decrypted will look like the following :

ipaddress_latitude_longitude

Which means you can use php’s explode function to convert it into an array as in the above example

Well the data could be construed as somewhat sensitive and could be used maliciously to (for the most part) geographically place the end user. The decision to encrypt the cookie data was made to protect the user from the data falling into the wrong hands. In the plugin code, we are using OpenSSL to encrypt/decrypt the geo-location data. You can use the function below to decrypt the cookie data :

// Function to decrypt session data
function shift8_geoip_decrypt($key, $garble) {
    if (!empty($key) && !empty($garble)) {
        list($encrypted_data, $iv) = explode('::', base64_decode($garble), 2);
        return openssl_decrypt($encrypted_data, 'aes-256-cbc', $key, 0, $iv);
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

So to actually use the above function, you could do the following :

shift8_geoip_decrypt(wp_salt('auth'), $_COOKIE['shift8_geoip']);

You can read more about the wp_salt function by clicking here