AES Encryption Via OpenSSL

February 1st, 2009

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 (the CBC IV is auto-generated by OpenSSL), 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.

  1. 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. ↩