AES-256 Cipher – Python Cryptography Examples
By Lane Wagner – @wagslane on Twitter
Need to encrypt some text with a password or private key in Python? You came to the right place. AES-256 is a solid symmetric cipher that is commonly used to encrypt data for oneself. In other words, the same person who is encrypting the data is typically decrypting it as well (think password manager)
Dependencies
For this tutorial, we will be using Python 3. Make sure you install pycrypto, which will give us access to an implementation of AES-256:
pip install pycrypto
Padding
AES-256 requires that the data to be encrypted is supplied in 16-byte blocks. We will naively add spaces to the end of our ciphertext to satisfy that requirement:
# pad with spaces at the end of the text
# beacuse AES needs 16 byte blocks
def pad(s):
block_size = 16
remainder = len(s) % block_size
padding_needed = block_size - remainder
return s + padding_needed * ' '
We will also create an unpad() function that strips the extra spaces off after decryption:
# remove the extra spaces at the end
def unpad(s):
return s.rstrip()
Encrypting
Now we create a simple encrypt(plain_text, password) function. This function uses the password to encrypt the plain text. Anyone with access to the encrypted text and the password will be able to decrypt it.
def encrypt(plain_text, password):
# generate a random salt
salt = os.urandom(AES.block_size)
# generate a random iv
iv = Random.new().read(AES.block_size)
# use the Scrypt KDF to get a private key from the password
private_key = hashlib.scrypt(password.encode(), salt=salt, n=2**14, r=8, p=1, dklen=32)
# pad text with spaces to be valid for AES CBC mode
padded_text = pad(plain_text)
# create cipher config
cipher_config = AES.new(private_key, AES.MODE_CBC, iv)
# return a dictionary with the encrypted text
return {
'cipher_text': base64.b64encode(cipher_config.encrypt(padded_text)),
'salt': base64.b64encode(salt),
'iv': base64.b64encode(iv)
}
Notes on encrypt() function
- IV: Initialization vector. The initialization vector must be random and new for each time our encryption function is used. Think of it as a random salt for a cipher.
- Scrypt: Scrypt is used to generate a secure private key from the password. This will make it harder for an attacker to brute-force our encryption.
- Salt: A new random salt is used for each run of our encryption. This makes it impossible for an attacker to use precomputed hashes in an attempt to crack the cipher. (see rainbow table)
- Scrypt parameters:
- N is the cost factor. It must be a power of two, and the higher it is the more secure the key, but the more resources it requires to run.
- R is the block size.
- P is the parallelization factor, useful for running on multiple cores.
- Base64: We encode all of our bytes-type data into base64 for convenient string representation
Decrypting
def decrypt(enc_dict, password):
# decode the dictionary entries from base64
salt = base64.b64decode(enc_dict['salt'])
enc = base64.b64decode(enc_dict['cipher_text'])
iv = base64.b64decode(enc_dict['iv'])
# generate the private key from the password and salt
private_key = hashlib.scrypt(password.encode(), salt=salt, n=2**14, r=8, p=1, dklen=32)
# create the cipher config
cipher = AES.new(private_key, AES.MODE_CBC, iv)
# decrypt the cipher text
decrypted = cipher.decrypt(enc)
# unpad the text to remove the added spaces
original = unpad(decrypted)
return original
Notes on decrypt() function
- The decrypt() function needs the same salt and iv that were used for encryption. We used a dictionary for convenience in parsing, but if we instead wanted one string of ciphertext we could have used a scheme like salt.iv.cipher_text
- The configuration parameters on the Scrypt and AES functions need to be the same as the encrypt function.
Give Me The Full Code!
You probably want to see it all work in an example script. Look no further!
# AES 256 encryption/decryption using pycrypto library
import base64
import hashlib
from Crypto.Cipher import AES
from Crypto import Random
import os
# pad with spaces at the end of the text
# beacuse AES needs 16 byte blocks
def pad(s):
block_size = 16
remainder = len(s) % block_size
padding_needed = block_size - remainder
return s + padding_needed * ' '
# remove the extra spaces at the end
def unpad(s):
return s.rstrip()
def encrypt(plain_text, password):
# generate a random salt
salt = os.urandom(AES.block_size)
# generate a random iv
iv = Random.new().read(AES.block_size)
# use the Scrypt KDF to get a private key from the password
private_key = hashlib.scrypt(password.encode(), salt=salt, n=2**14, r=8, p=1, dklen=32)
# pad text with spaces to be valid for AES CBC mode
padded_text = pad(plain_text)
# create cipher config
cipher_config = AES.new(private_key, AES.MODE_CBC, iv)
# return a dictionary with the encrypted text
return {
'cipher_text': base64.b64encode(cipher_config.encrypt(padded_text)),
'salt': base64.b64encode(salt),
'iv': base64.b64encode(iv)
}
def decrypt(enc_dict, password):
# decode the dictionary entries from base64
salt = base64.b64decode(enc_dict['salt'])
enc = base64.b64decode(enc_dict['cipher_text'])
iv = base64.b64decode(enc_dict['iv'])
# generate the private key from the password and salt
private_key = hashlib.scrypt(password.encode(), salt=salt, n=2**14, r=8, p=1, dklen=32)
# create the cipher config
cipher = AES.new(private_key, AES.MODE_CBC, iv)
# decrypt the cipher text
decrypted = cipher.decrypt(enc)
# unpad the text to remove the added spaces
original = unpad(decrypted)
return original
def main():
password = input("Password: ")
# First let us encrypt secret message
encrypted = encrypt("The secretest message", password)
print(encrypted)
# Let us decrypt using our original password
decrypted = decrypt(encrypted, password)
print(bytes.decode(decrypted))
Thanks For Reading
Lane on Twitter: @wagslane
Lane on Dev.to: wagslane
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