[erlang-questions] Private key encryption

[Joe Armstrong]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 3:54 PM, Marcus Nilsson <tandy.nilsson@REDACTED> wrote:
> 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

One alternative you might like to consider is making the envelope with
term_to_binary
To encode say

    Bin = term_to_binary({rsa_aes, EncryptedSecret, EncryptedContent})

and to decode

   {Tag, X, Y} = binary_to_term(Bin)

The tag tells how the arguments were encrypted - this can be extended
to make multiple nested containers
(rather like the ASN.1 containers used in RSA etc. but far easier :-)

/Joe






>
> 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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