How can the issue of missing initialization vectors be addressed when using OpenSSL for file encryption in PHP?

Issue: Missing initialization vectors can lead to security vulnerabilities in file encryption using OpenSSL in PHP. To address this issue, it is important to generate a random initialization vector for each encryption operation.

// Generate a random initialization vector
$iv = openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(openssl_cipher_iv_length('aes-256-cbc'));

// Encrypt the file using OpenSSL with the generated IV
openssl_encrypt(file_get_contents('file_to_encrypt.txt'), 'aes-256-cbc', 'encryption_key', 0, $iv);

// Save the IV along with the encrypted file
file_put_contents('encrypted_file.txt', $iv . $encrypted_data);