If you have ever wanted to encrypt a blob of data for transmission or archival, OpenSSL provides a simple way to accomplish this task without resorting to platform specific tools.
To encrypt1:
openssl enc -e -aes-256-cbc -in filename -out filename.enc
To decrypt:
openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -in filename.enc -out filename.dec
The example above uses AES256 in cipher block chaining mode, however there are almost 50 different cipher functions available for encryption. To see a list, just type openssl enc help. I would very seriously recommend staying with well-known and accepted standard ciphers like AES unless you have an explicit need to choose something more esoteric.
- You can also add -a to encode to base64 so you can easily send via email or other methods that don’t support binary encoding. ↩
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