Since, "you even can send [the IV] along with your ciphertext without loosing security," a nice way to handle this is to prepend your IV to your ciphertext. Even though the mechanism is the same, the setting values are different, so this can't be decrypted with "AES" no matter how hard I try. Please check your PHP configuration. A block transform takes a fixed-length block of plaintext, transforms it using a secret key of some chosen size, and produces an identical-length block of ciphertext. Once the module is open, you create an IV initialization vector.
nest...