title: shorter php cipher than md5?
body: <p>For a variety of stupid reasons, the maximum length of a given form variable that we are posting to an external server is 12 characters.</p>
  
  <p>I wanted to obscure that value with md5, but obviously with 12 characters that isn't going to work.  Is there a cipher with an already-made PHP function which will result in something 12 characters or less?</p>
  
  <p>The security and integrity of the cipher isn't super important here.  My last resort is to just write a function which moves each letter up or down an ascii value by x.  So the goal isn't to obscure it from a cryptography expert, but just to not post it in plain text so a non-technical worker looking at it won't know what it is.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any advice.</p>