How to Enter Key Manually Using R’s Cyphr Library

Introduction

In this article, we will explore how to enter a key manually using R’s cyphr library. The cyphr library is a collection of tools for cryptographic applications in R. It provides functions for generating keys, encrypting and decrypting data, and more.

Background

The cyphr library uses the sodium algorithm for cryptographic operations. This algorithm is widely used for its speed and security features.

In this article, we will start by creating a key using the keygen function from the sodium package and then use it to create a key object using the key_sodium function from the cyphr library.

Problem Statement

When working with cryptographic keys in R, there are situations where you might need to manually enter a key. This can happen when you want to reuse a key or when you need to recover a key from a file.

In this article, we will explore how to enter a key manually using the cyphr library and discuss potential solutions for problems that may arise.

Solution

To solve this problem, we will use the strsplit function to split the string at each space, convert the resulting values to raw mode using the as.raw function, and then use these raw values as input to create a key object using the key_sodium function from the cyphr library.

Here is an example of how to manually enter a key:

library("cyphr")
k <- unname(sapply(strsplit(k1, " ")[[1]], function(x) as.raw(as.hexmode(x))))
key <- key_sodium(k)

In this code snippet, we first create a character string k1 containing the manually entered key. We then use the strsplit function to split the string at each space and convert the resulting values to raw mode using the as.raw function.

The sapply function is used to apply the conversion to each value in the list returned by strsplit. The unname function is used to remove the names from the resulting object, as we are only interested in the raw values.

Finally, we use these raw values as input to create a key object using the key_sodium function from the cyphr library.

Here is an example of how to check if the conversion was successful:

k <- unname(sapply(strsplit(k1, " ")[[1]], function(x) as.raw(as.hexmode(x))))
str(k)
#raw [1:32] af ee af 08 ...

key <- key_sodium(k)

str(key)
#[1] "cyphr_key: sodium"
class(key)
#[1] "cyphr_key"      # The class should be raw

Finally, we use these raw values as input to create a key object using the key_sodium function from the cyphr library.

We then check if the conversion was successful by examining the output of the str and class functions.

Why `noquote` Did Not Work

The noquote function is used to remove quotes from character strings in R. However, it does not convert character class objects to raw mode.

Here is an example:

k1 <- "af ee af 08 5b 75 42 7b 83 05 67 69 82 66 55 67 ea ee 04 76 90 cb b2 19 49 11 15 ab 53 5f e9 aa"
class(noquote(k1))
#[1] "noquote"

In this code snippet, we create a character string k1 containing the manually entered key. We then use the noquote function to remove quotes from the string.

However, as shown in the output, the class of the resulting object is still "noquote", indicating that it remains a character class object rather than a raw value.

We need the class of the resulting object to be "raw" in order to use it as input to create a key object using the key_sodium function from the cyphr library.

Conclusion

In this article, we explored how to enter a key manually using R’s cyphr library. We discussed potential solutions for problems that may arise and provided examples of how to manually enter a key.

We hope that this article has helped you understand how to work with cryptographic keys in R and recover them from files when needed.

Last modified on 2024-04-06