Forms—A better way
The better form processing that I propose is inspired by Drupal, but furthers the idea to improve on it. In order to properly understand the approach, though, you should understand how Cryptographic Signing (specifically, Authenticated Encryption) and the Galois Counter Mode (GCM) operate.
A quick overview of the GCM cipher goes like this: Given a secret key, a plaintext, and an initialization vector (IV), a GCM cipher should return a ciphertext and an authentication code. The ciphertext, IV, and authentication code is then given to the user. When the user returns, the GCM decrypt function takes in the secret key, the ciphertext, the IV, and the authentication code, and returns the plaintext. This may sound a bit complicated, so let me break it down a bit more.
The secret key is something that is stored serverside, and is preferably unique to each user. The IV is a short string that is unique to that encryption. The uniqueness is a requirement to a counter-type of encryption like GCM. In short, the IV must be different every time that the encryption is called, otherwise the ciphertext is vulnerable. Lastly, the authentication code is a string which validates that the contents of the encrypted text has not been tampered with. It does not matter if the end user is given the encrypted text, IV, and authentication code, because if the user changes any part of any one of these, then they will not validate when combined with the secret key.
