While Ruby comes with an OpenSSL binding, it is not easy to use and it is basically not documented.

Features

• Defaults to AES 128 CBC
• Will use the systems OpenSSL library for transparent hardware crypto support
• Single class object oriented access to most commonly used features
• Ruby like

Simple examples

To encrypt:

Generate a key using a password and a salt. Use the keys encrypt method to encrypt a strings worth of data:

@key=EzCrypto::Key.with_password "password", "system salt"
@encrypted=@key.encrypt "Top secret should not be revealed"

To decrypt:

Same procedure as encrypt. Generate a key using a password and a salt. Use the keys decrypt method to decrypt a strings worth of data:

@key=EzCrypto::Key.with_password "password", "system salt"
@key.decrypt @encrypted

One liners:

These simple examples use one line each:

@encrypted=EzCrypto::Key.encrypt_with_password "password", @salt,"Top secret should not be revealed"
  
bc. EzCrypto::Key.decrypt_with_password "password", @salt,@encrypted

Keys

The only class you need to know for most uses og EzCrypto is the Key class. You don’t need understand ciphers or the encryption life cycle.

Generating a random key

The most secure type of key is the randomly generated key:

@key=EzCrypto::Key.generate

Initializing a key with raw key data

If you already have a key from some other source, you simply have to call the constructor with the raw data:

@key=EzCrypto::Key.new @binarykey

Initializing a Key with a Base64 encoded key

As seen above you can create a key from a password. This should be used if you don’t want the key to be stored on disk for example:

@key=EzCrypto::Key.with_password "Secret password"

Initializing a Key with a Base64 encoded key

If you already have a key from some other source in the popular Base64 encoded format, you use the decode class method:

@key=EzCrypto::Key.decode @binarykey

Exporting the key

To export or save a key use the encode method (or to_s) method for a Base64 encoded key or raw as the raw binary data.

puts @key.encode
puts @key.raw
  
The raw method could be used for storing in a database using a tinyblob column.

Encryption and Decryption

EzCrypto is optimized for simple encryption and decryption of strings. There are encrypt/decrypt pairs for normal binary use as well as for Base64 encoded use.

Regular raw use

Assuming you have generated a key using one of the above methods:

@encrypted=@key.encrypt("clear text")
@decrypted=@key.decrypt(@encrypted)
assert "clear text", @decrypted

Base64 encoded use

This uses the encrypt64 and decrypt64 methods. Otherwise it is all the same:

@encrypted=@key.encrypt64("clear text")
@decrypted=@key.decrypt64(@encrypted)
assert "clear text", @decrypted

Where to get it

You can download it from it’s RubyForge project

I have uploaded a gem, but I’m not sure if there is anything else I need to do for it to work, but eventually anyway you should be able to do: gem install ezcrypto.

Also check out the EzCrypto Documentation .