Openssl Generate Aes 256 Ctr Key

Symmetric Encryption and Decryption
Documentation
#include <openssl/evp.h>

The libcrypto library within OpenSSL provides functions for performing symmetric encryption and decryption operations across a wide range of algorithms and modes. This page walks you through the basics of performing a simple encryption and corresponding decryption operation.

In order to perform encryption/decryption you need to know:

  • Your algorithm
  • Your mode
  • Your key
  • Your Initialisation Vector (IV)

Re: How to create AES128 encrypted key with openssl Sure, just get 128 bits of data from /dev/random and you have an AES 128 key that can be used to encrypt anything you like (and decrypt it too). But you can never make an SSL certificate out of such a key. My goal was to create a private key and to encrypt it with a strong cipher. That key would be used as a root certificate for an internal Certification Authority. However, eventhough openssl suppor.

This page assumes that you know what all of these things mean. If you don't then please refer to Basics of Encryption.

The complete source code of the following example can be downloaded as evp-symmetric-encrypt.c.

  1. This might be a noob question, but I couldn't find its answer anywhere online: why does an OpenSSL generated 256-bit AES key have 64 characters? The command I'm using to generate the key is: $ ope.
  2. The call to generate the key using the elliptic curve parameters generated in the example above looks like this. $ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -e -iter 1000 -salt -in primes.dat -out primes.enc enter aes-256-cbc encryption password: Verifying - enter aes-256-cbc encryption password. Overview of OpenSSL's command line utilities Command.
  3. The libcrypto library within OpenSSL provides functions for performing symmetric encryption and decryption operations across a wide range of algorithms and modes. This page walks you through the basics of performing a simple encryption and corresponding decryption operation.


Setting it up[edit]

The code below sets up the program. In this example we are going to take a simple message ('The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'), and then encrypt it using a predefined key and IV. In this example the key and IV have been hard coded in - in a real situation you would never do this! Following encryption we will then decrypt the resulting ciphertext, and (hopefully!) end up with the message we first started with. This program expects two functions to be defined: 'encrypt' and 'decrypt'. We will define those further down the page. Note that this uses the auto-init facility in 1.1.0.

The program sets up a 256 bit key and a 128 bit IV. This is appropriate for the 256-bit AES encryption that we going to be doing in CBC mode. Make sure you use the right key and IV length for the cipher you have selected, or it will go horribly wrong!! The IV should be random for CBC mode.

We've also set up a buffer for the ciphertext to be placed in. It is important to ensure that this buffer is sufficiently large for the expected ciphertext or you may see a program crash (or potentially introduce a security vulnerability into your code). Note: The ciphertext may be longer than the plaintext (e.g. if padding is being used).

We're also going to need a helper function to handle any errors. This will simply dump any error messages from the OpenSSL error stack to the screen, and then abort the program.

Openssl Generate Aes 256 Ctr Key

Encrypting the message[edit]

So now that we have set up the program we need to define the 'encrypt' function. This will take as parameters the plaintext, the length of the plaintext, the key to be used, and the IV. We'll also take in a buffer to put the ciphertext in (which we assume to be long enough), and will return the length of the ciphertext that we have written.

Encrypting consists of the following stages:

  • Setting up a context
  • Initialising the encryption operation
  • Providing plaintext bytes to be encrypted
  • Finalising the encryption operation

During initialisation we will provide an EVP_CIPHER object. In this case we are using EVP_aes_256_cbc(), which uses the AES algorithm with a 256-bit key in CBC mode. Refer to Working with Algorithms and Modes for further details.

Decrypting the Message[edit]

Finally we need to define the 'decrypt' operation. This is very similar to encryption and consists of the following stages:Decrypting consists of the following stages:

  • Setting up a context
  • Initialising the decryption operation
  • Providing ciphertext bytes to be decrypted
  • Finalising the decryption operation

Again through the parameters we will receive the ciphertext to be decrypted, the length of the ciphertext, the key and the IV. We'll also receive a buffer to place the decrypted text into, and return the length of the plaintext we have found.

Note that we have passed the length of the ciphertext. This is required as you cannot use functions such as 'strlen' on this data - its binary! Similarly, even though in this example our plaintext really is ASCII text, OpenSSL does not know that. In spite of the name plaintext could be binary data, and therefore no NULL terminator will be put on the end (unless you encrypt the NULL as well of course).

Here is the decrypt function:

Ctr

Openssl Aes Example

Ciphertext Output[edit]

If all goes well you should end up with output that looks like the following:

For further details about symmetric encryption and decryption operations refer to the OpenSSL documentation Manual:EVP_EncryptInit(3).

Padding[edit]

OpenSSL uses PKCS padding by default. If the mode you are using allows you to change the padding, then you can change it with EVP_CIPHER_CTX_set_padding. From the man page:

EVP_CIPHER_CTX_set_padding() enables or disables padding. By default encryption operations are padded using standard block padding and the padding is checked and removed when decrypting. If the pad parameter is zero then no padding is performed, the total amount of data encrypted or decrypted must then be a multiple of the block size or an error will occur..

PKCS padding works by adding n padding bytes of value n to make the total length of the encrypted data a multiple of the block size. Padding is always added so if the data is already a multiple of the block size n will equal the block size. For example if the block size is 8 and 11 bytes are to be encrypted then 5 padding bytes of value 5 will be added..

If padding is disabled then the decryption operation will only succeed if the total amount of data decrypted is a multiple of the block size.

C++ Programs[edit]

Questions regarding how to use the EVP interfaces from a C++ program arise on occasion. Generally speaking, using the EVP interfaces from a C++ program is the same as using them from a C program.

You can download a sample program using EVP symmetric encryption and C++11 called evp-encrypt.cxx. The sample uses a custom allocator to zeroize memory, C++ smart pointers to manage resources, and provides a secure_string using basic_string and the custom allocator. You need to use g++ -std=c++11 .. to compile it because of std::unique_ptr.

You should also ensure you configure an build with -fexception to ensure C++ exceptions pass as expected through C code. And you should avoid other flags, like -fno-exceptions and -fno-rtti.

The program's main simply encrypts and decrypts a string using AES-256 in CBC mode:

And the encryption routine is as follows. The decryption routine is similar:

Notes on some unusual modes[edit]

Worthy of mention here is the XTS mode (e.g. EVP_aes_256_xts()). This works in exactly the same way as shown above, except that the 'tweak' is provided in the IV parameter. A further 'gotcha' is that XTS mode expects a key which is twice as long as normal. Therefore EVP_aes_256_xts() expects a key which is 512-bits long.

Authenticated encryption modes (GCM or CCM) work in essentially the same way as shown above but require some special handling. See EVP Authenticated Encryption and Decryption for further details.

See also[edit]

Retrieved from 'https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php?title=EVP_Symmetric_Encryption_and_Decryption&oldid=2787'

The openssl program provides a rich variety of commands, each of which often has a wealth of options and arguments. Many commands use an external configuration file for some or all of their arguments and have a -config option to specify that file. The environment variable OPENSSL_CONF can be used to specify the location of the configuration file. If the environment variable is not specified, a default file is created in the default certificate storage area called openssl.cnf. The settings in this default configuration file depend on the flags set when the version of OpenSSL being used was built.

This article is an overview of the available tools provided by openssl. For all of the details on usage and implementation, you can find the manpages which are automatically generated from the source code at the official OpenSSL project home. Likewise, the source code itself may be found on the OpenSSL project home page, as well as on the OpenSSL Github. The main OpenSSL site also includes an overview of the command-line utilities, as well as links to all of their respective documentation.

  • 2Basic Tasks
    • 2.5Generating Keys Based on Elliptic Curves
      • 2.5.1Generating the Curve Parameters
  • 3Commands

The entry point for the OpenSSL library is the openssl binary, usually /usr/bin/openssl on Linux. The general syntax for calling openssl is as follows:

Alternatively, you can call openssl without arguments to enter the interactive mode prompt. You may then enter commands directly, exiting with either a quit command or by issuing a termination signal with either Ctrl+C or Ctrl+D. The following is a sample interactive session in which the user invokes the prime command twice before using the quit command to terminate the session.

This section is a brief tutorial on performing the most basic tasks using OpenSSL. For a detailed explanation of the rationale behind the syntax and semantics of the commands shown here, see the section on Commands.

Getting Help[edit]

As mentioned previously, the general syntax of a command is openssl command [ command_options ] [ command_arguments ]. The help command is no different, but it does have its idiosyncrasies. To view the top-level help menu, you can call openssl as follows.

This query will print all of the available commands, like so:

Note the above output was truncated, so only the first four lines of output are shown.

A help menu for each command may be requested in two different ways. First, the same command used above may be repeated, followed by the name of the command to print help for.

The program will then display the valid options for the given command.

Windows 10 licence key generator. For instance, Windows 10 home key will be the best choice for you if you are both a home and a non-commercial user.

The second way of requesting the help menu for a particular command is by using the first option in the output shown above, namely openssl command -help. Both commands will yield the same output; the help menu displayed will be exactly the same.

For additional information on the usage of a particular command, the project manpages are a great source of information. Another excellent source of information is the project perldocs. perldoc is a utility included with most if not all Perl distributions, and it's capable of displaying documentation information in a variety of formats, one of which is as manpages. Not surprisingly, the project documentation is generated from the pod files located in the doc directory of the source code.

Getting Library Version Information[edit]

As mentioned above, the version command's help menu may be queried for additional options like so:

Using the -a option to show all version information yields the following output on my current machine:

Generating an RSA Private Key[edit]

Generating a private key can be done in a variety of different ways depending on the type of key, algorithm, bits, and other options your specific use case may require. In this example, we are generating a private key using RSA and a key size of 2048 bits.

To generate a password protected private key, the previous command may be slightly amended as follows:

The addition of the -aes256 option specifies the cipher to use to encrypt the private key file. For a list of available ciphers in the library, you can run the following command:

With your private key in hand, you can use the following command to see the key's details, such as its modulus and its constituent primes. Remember to change the name of the input file to the file name of your private key.

The above command yields the following output in my specific case. Your output will differ but should be structurally similar.

Keep in mind the above key was generated solely for pedagogical purposes; never give anyone access to your private keys.

Generating a Public Key[edit]

Having previously generated your private key, you may generate the corresponding public key using the following command.

You may once again view the key details, using a slightly different command this time.

Generate Aes Key Openssl

The output for the public key will be shorter, as it carries much less information, and it will look something like this.

For more information on generating keys, see the source code documentation, located in the doc/HOWTO/keys.txt file.

Generating Keys Based on Elliptic Curves[edit]

There are essentially two steps to generating a key:

C++ Openssl Aes

  1. Generate the parameters for the specific curve you are using
  2. Use those parameters to generate the key

To see the list of curves instrinsically supported by openssl, you can use the -list_curves</t> option when calling the <tt>ecparam command.

For this example I will use the prime256v1 curve, which is an X9.62/SECG curve over a 256 bit prime field.

Generating the Curve Parameters[edit]

Having selected our curve, we now call ecparam to generate our parameters file.

Printing Parameters to Standard Out[edit]

Openssl Generate Aes 256 Ctr Key West

You can print the generated curve parameters to the terminal output with the following command:

Printing Parameters as C Code[edit]

Analogously, you may also output the generated curve parameters as C code. The parameters can then be loaded by calling the get_ec_group_XXX() function. To print the C code to the current terminal's output, the following command may be used:

And here are the first few lines of the corresponding output:

Generating the Key[edit]

With the curve parameters in hand, we are now free to generate the key. Just as with the [#Generating an RSA Private Key RSA] example above, we may optionally specify a cipher algorithm with which to encrypt the private key. The call to generate the key using the elliptic curve parameters generated in the example above looks like this:

Putting it All Together[edit]

The process of generation a curve based on elliptic-curves can be streamlined by calling the genpkey command directly and specifying both the algorithm and the name of the curve to use for parameter generation. In it's simplest form, the command to generate a key based on the same curve as in the example above looks like this:

This command will result in the generated key being printed to the terminal's output.

Remember that you can specify a cipher algorithm to encrypt the key with, which something you may or may not want to do, depending on your specific use case. Here is a slightly more complete example showing a key generated with a password and written to a specific output file.

Just as with the previous example, you can use the pkey command to inspect your newly-generated key.

For more details on elliptic curve cryptography or key generation, check out the manpages.

Base64 Encoding Strings[edit]

For simple string encoding, you can use 'here string' syntax with the base64 command as below. Intuitively, the -e flag specifies the action to be encoding.

Similarly, the base64 command's -d flag may be used to indicate decoding mode.

Generating a File Hash[edit]

One of the most basic uses of the dgst command (short for digest) is viewing the hash of a given file. To do this, simply invoke the command with the specified digest algorithm to use. For this example, I will be hashing an arbitrary file on my system using the MD5, SHA1, and SHA384 algorithms.

For a list of the available digest algorithms, you can use the following command.

You can also use a similar command to see the available digest commands:

Below are three sample invocations of the md5, sha1, and sha384 digest commands using the same file as the dgst command invocation above.

File Encryption and Decryption[edit]

The following example demonstrates a simple file encryption and decryption using the enc command. The first argument is the cipher algorithm to use for encrypting the file. For this example I carefully selected the AES-256 algorithm in CBC Mode by looking up the available ciphers and picking out the first one I saw. To see the list of available ciphers, you can use the following command.

You can also use the following command:

Having selected an encryption algorithm, you must then specify whether the action you are taking is either encryption or decryption via the -e or -d flags, respectively. The -iter flag specifies the number of iterations on the password used for deriving the encryption key. A higher iteration count increases the time required to brute-force the resulting file. Using this option implies enabling use of the Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2, usually set using the -pbkdf2 flag. We then use the -salt flag to enable the use of a randomly generated salt in the key-derivation function.

Putting it all together, you can see the command to encrypt a file and the corresponding output below. Note that the passwords entered by the user are blank, just as they would usually be in a terminal session.

The analogous decryption command is as follows:

Openssl Generate Aes 256 Ctr Key Code

There are three different kinds of commands. These are standard commands, cipher commands, and digest commands. Calling the OpenSSL top-level help command with no arguments will result in openssl printing all available commands by group, sorted alphabetically.

Standard Commands[edit]

Aes 256 Encryption

Overview of OpenSSL's command line utilities
Command Description
asn1parse Parse an ASN.1 sequence.
ca Certificate Authority (CA) Management.
ciphers Cipher Suite Description Determination.
cms CMS (Cryptographic Message Syntax) utility.
crl Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Management.
crl2pkcs7 CRL to PKCS#7 Conversion.
dgst Message Digest calculation. MAC calculations are superseded by mac(1).
dhparam Generation and Management of Diffie-Hellman Parameters. Superseded by genpkey(1) and pkeyparam(1).
dsa DSA Data Management.
dsaparam DSA Parameter Generation and Management. Superseded by genpkey(1) and pkeyparam(1).
ec EC (Elliptic curve) key processing.
ecparam EC parameter manipulation and generation.
enc Encoding with Ciphers.
engine Engine (loadable module) information and manipulation.
errstr Error Number to Error String Conversion.
gendsa Generation of DSA Private Key from Parameters. Superseded by genpkey(1) and pkey(1).
genpkey Generation of Private Key or Parameters.
genrsa Generation of RSA Private Key. Superseded by genpkey(1).
info Display diverse information built into the OpenSSL libraries.
kdf Key Derivation Functions.
mac Message Authentication Code Calculation.
nseq Create or examine a Netscape certificate sequence.
ocsp Online Certificate Status Protocol utility.
passwd Generation of hashed passwords.
pkcs12 PKCS#12 Data Management.
pkcs7 PKCS#7 Data Management.
pkcs8 PKCS#8 format private key conversion tool.
pkey Public and private key management.
pkeyparam Public key algorithm parameter management.
pkeyutl Public key algorithm cryptographic operation utility.
prime Compute prime numbers.
rand Generate pseudo-random bytes.
rehash Create symbolic links to certificate and CRL files named by the hash values.
req PKCS#10 X.509 Certificate Signing Request (CSR) Management.
rsa RSA key management.
rsautl RSA utility for signing, verification, encryption, and decryption. Superseded by pkeyutl(1).
s_client This implements a generic SSL/TLS client which can establish a transparent connection to a remote server speaking SSL/TLS.
s_server This implements a generic SSL/TLS server which accepts connections from remote clients speaking SSL/TLS.
s_time SSL Connection Timer.
sess_id SSL Session Data Management.
smime S/MIME mail processing.
speed Algorithm Speed Measurement.
spkac SPKAC printing and generating utility.
srp Maintain SRP password file.
storeutl Utility to list and display certificates, keys, CRLs, etc.
ts Time Stamping Authority tool (client/server).
verify X.509 Certificate Verification.
version OpenSSL Version Information.
x509 X.509 Certificate Data Management.
  • Paul Heinlein. 'OpenSSL Command-Line HOWTO'. Has many quick cookbook-style recipes for doing common tasks using the 'oppenssl' command-line application.

Openssl Generate Aes 256 Ctr Key Download

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