My day job i use ssh… alot. When you manage hundreds of servers with mission critical infastructure running on passswordless login with ssh keys can be huge time saver. I also take security pretty seriously when it comes to store sensitive information and always looking to find better ways to store sensitive information securely and also in a convenient way for it to be not cumbersome. With that thought combining ssh keys to encrypt/decrypt files made quite sense so here is a quick write up to do it for anyone else that are interested in it.

1. Create or open a file that you would like to encrypt.
➜  ~ echo "my super secret information" > secret.txt
➜  ~ cat secret.txt 
my super secret information
2. If you havent already create a rsa key pair. If you would like to use existing rsa key pair skip this step and continue to step 3.
ssh-keygen
3. Export your generated or existing public key to pem format.
openssl rsa -in ~/.ssh/id_rsa -pubout > ~/id_rsa.pub.pem
4. Now you are ready encrypt the file you created earliear.
cat secret.txt  | openssl rsautl -encrypt -pubin -inkey ~/id_rsa.pub.pem > encrypted-secret.txt
cat encrypted-secret.txt 
????uG?????$?&?????VN?'?(????,þQaE咫:?i??t?(?jr.g?#?ջO???=*?e??<"?y'% 
5. To decypt the secret
➜  ~ cat encrypted-secret.txt  | openssl rsautl -decrypt -inkey ~/.ssh/id_rsa
my super secret information

serkan haytac

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
AWS Certified Developer - Associate
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate
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