How to encode/decode data with a RSA key?

A lot of data is currently on internet and using cloud infrastructures, so if we have private/sensitive datas, we must protect them!

That's why today we will see how to encode/decode data with a RSA key.

What is a RSA key?

A RSA key is a pair of key which allows us to do asymmetric encryption.

Composed of a public and a private key, the first one is used to encode messages which can only be decoded by the second one.

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Generate a key

In our example, we will see how to generate a RSA key in Python, but you can generate one using a terminal. Here is a post where I explain how to do it.

Link post - How to generate a SSH RSA key

Setup

Before going forward, we must install pycryptodomex with the following command

pip install pycryptodomex

Code

from Crypto.PublicKey import RSA 

# Generate a RSA key
rsa_key = RSA.generate(2048) 

# Export private and public keys
private_key = rsa_key.exportKey("PEM") 
public_key = rsa_key.publickey().exportKey("PEM") 

# Écriture des clés dans des fichiers
fd = open("private_key.pem", "wb") 
fd.write(private_key) 
fd.close() 

fd = open("public_key.pem", "wb") 
fd.write(public_key) 
fd.close()

As you can see, with pycryptodomex I really easy.

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Encode/decode data

Now that we have our keys, we can easily encode and decode data with pycryptodomex.

from Crypto.Cipher import PKCS1_OAEP 
from Crypto.PublicKey import RSA 

message = b'Test message' 

public_key = RSA.import_key(open('public_key.pem').read()) 
cipher = PKCS1_OAEP.new(public_key) 
ciphertext = cipher.encrypt(message) 
print(ciphertext) 

private_key = RSA.import_key(open('private_key.pem').read()) 
cipher = PKCS1_OAEP.new(private_key) 
decoded_message = cipher.decrypt(ciphertext) 

print(decoded_message.decode("utf-8"))

And if you test the code, you should see the message "Test message" encoded, then full decoded!

So with this, you now know how to encode/decode data with a RSA key!

I hope it will help you! 🍺

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