[erlang-questions] Private key encryption

Marcus Nilsson tandy.nilsson@REDACTED
Tue Apr 14 15:54:27 CEST 2015


Thanks for the reply Martin and helping me with this.

The reason for doing this is that I want to share the files with a few people.
After getting a better understanding of how this works I changed the
my approach to this.

Encryption
1. A shared secret is generated in the following form [Key, IV]
2. This secret is then used to encrypt the binary with aes_cfb128 a
symmetric block encryption algo
3. The secret is then encrypted with the private key with RSA a
asymmetric encryption algo
4. Both the encrypted shared secret and content is concatenated in the
output file like this <<SharedSecretLength, EncryptedSecret,
EncryptedContent>>

Decryption

1. Extract the encrypted secret from the file
2. Decrypt the shared secret with the public key with RSA
3. Decrypt the encrypted content with the now decrypted secret with
aes_cfb128 algo

The following snippet seems to do the job

    Key = crypto:rand_bytes(16),
    IV = crypto:rand_bytes(16),
    EncryptedContent = crypto:block_encrypt(aes_cfb128, Key, IV, Input),
    EncryptedKey = public_key:encrypt_private(list_to_binary([Key,
IV]), PrivKey),
    [integer_to_binary(byte_size(EncryptedKey)), EncryptedKey,
EncryptedContent].

Thanks
/Marcus

2015-04-14 0:54 GMT+02:00 Martin Karlsson <martink@REDACTED>:
> Hi Marcus,
>
> The encrypt_private is doing an RSA encryption using PKCS1 padding by
> default.
>
> RSA can't encrypt large payloads (i.e. 256 bytes - 11 for padding for 2048
> bit RSA keys) so this is the likely reason you can only encrypt small
> portions of the file.
>
> Normally you use public key crypto to encrypt a symmetrical key and then
> encrypt the large payload with the symmetric key using AES or something.
>
> In addition you don't want to encrypt using the private key but rather the
> public key, otherwise anyone with access to your public key can decrypt the
> cipher. Private key encryption is usually only used for signatures.
>
> Crypto is hard to get right, especially if you are only working with RSA
> primitives (you need to think about padding, hashing, MDCs, signatures). You
> might want to have a look a NaCl (https://github.com/jloius/enacl for a
> binding to erlang) which is much friendlier to use.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
>
> On Tuesday, 14 April 2015, Marcus Nilsson <tandy.nilsson@REDACTED> wrote:
>>
>> I'am trying to encrypt a bigger file with the public_key module.
>> Everything works fine as long as the content of the file is small.
>>
>> But when the size of the binary exceed's a certain size I get a
>> **error:encrypt_failed. I guess this has to do with the padding parameter.
>>
>> But I have not been able to find any documentation how to compute the
>> padding to get this working any help would be very welcomed!
>>
>> I use this code to perform the encryption
>>
>> public_key:encrypt_private(Input, PrivKey);
>>
>> /Marcus



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