Ncypher

Ncypher is a gem to help you to encrypt your credentials in your ruby apps in a safe manner.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'ncypher'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install ncypher

Basic Usage

First generate a new encryption key. Typically this key needs to be in your .gitignore. You don't want it to be pushed to the repository. This file will be used by ncypher each time you need to encrypt/decrypt something. You need to call it .ncypher_key and put it in the current folder or any other folder before. (i.e ~/.ncypher_key is fine for instance).

$> ncypher generate_key > .ncypher_key

You can also set the env variable NCYPHER_KEY to that generated key (i.e export NCYPHER_KEY=kSzARCAw9uv/LQ1o75k5ica1oCpZBUCpP99Sy+s6L2c=) instead of saving it to a file

To encrypt a new password (or anything else), ncypher supports stdin. So you can do:

$> cat secret_file | ncypher encrypt > secret_file.encrypted
$> cat secret_file.encrypted | ncypher decrypt > secret_file
$> ncypher encrypt
mypassword
<CTRL+D>
TAmmvlinPFBmH9bx+IW9L5lKkRdgv3Yv3P4kyyIs0uTTyiTunG7vZ+DNVHMJiuviHOHg

I highly recommend you to always use that method! As passing the password as parameter will keep it in your shell history (unless you have HISTFILE=/dev/null).

If you want to do it by passing the pass as parameter:

$> ncypher encrypt 'p4$$w0rd'
deB7ba27qR470UetK/HW47dYMN7p9hguuDiVt59U+Bly6cfQcjgbw/ui/2hBhCEa

Note, you can also use the decrypt parameter in the ncypher binary to do the decryption:

$> ncypher decrypt deB7ba27qR470UetK/HW47dYMN7p9hguuDiVt59U+Bly6cfQcjgbw/ui/2hBhCEa 
p4$$w0rd 

So in the end:

$> ncypher decrypt `ncypher encrypt 'p4$$w0rd'`
p4$$w0rd

:)

And Ncypher::Ncypher.decrypt will magically use your key in .ncypher_key to decrypt that password at runtime. Now you can directy put in your .yaml files:

defaults: &defaults
  my_password: <%= Ncypher::Ncypher.decrypt('lXEwfKv4dEjmK0kojEAnikNsLCsVCtSMiR2aSfM6uUXYn2DzCZ3O7SA9HaGnMp/kEEsI') %>

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/pcboy/ncypher. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.