Encrypt/Decrypt Confidential Data Using OpenSSL

If you wish to perform encrypted file transfers, openssl provides a robust implementation of SSL v2/3 and TLS v1 as well as full strength generic cryptographic functionalities. Available for almost every commonly used operating system, openssl can be used as a general purpose tool instead of looking for other specialized tools.

If you wish to have full strength cryptographic functions, openssl is a perfect choice. Forget about all other tools that promise to provide high end encryption for your confidential data. Openssl is more than enough for most of your cryptographic needs. Personally, I can't just rely on some random software that promises to provide full strength cryptography but lacks documentations and detailed reviews. Openssl, however, has a well structured documentation and is an open source implementation.

Openssl supports several ciphers such as AES, Blowfish, RC5, etc., several cryptographic hash functions such as MD5, SHA512, etc., and public key cryptographies such as RSA, DSA, etc. Openssl has been widely used in several softwares most notably the OpenSSH.

Now that we know some basics about what OpenSSL is, lets move on encrypting/decrypting files/data using openssl. OpenSSL can take any file and then apply one of the cryptographic functions to encrypt the file. As an example, we encrypt a confidential file 'priv8' with a password "hello" below:

samar@Techgaun:~$ openssl aes-256-cbc -e -in priv8 -out priv8.enc -pass pass:hello

In order to decrypt the encrypted file, we can run the following command:

samar@Techgaun:~$ openssl aes-256-cbc -e -in priv8.enc -out priv8 -pass pass:hello

Now that you know the basic syntax, you can choose among several available cryptographic functions. There are several other symmetric ciphers available for use. The full list of these ciphers is provided by the command:

samar@Techgaun:~$ openssl list-cipher-algorithms

I hope this helps for your file encryption needs :)