Shell Script Wrapper Around OpenSSL and AES-256 in macOS

Overview

This is a follow on from from a blog by John Martellaro back in 2016 [1]. In that post, two examples of encryption on OS X were given. The first was disk encryption and the second was on encrypting and decrypting files using OpenSSL and AES-256 [2]. My posting is about putting a basic shell wrapper around the raw OpenSSL commands.

Please note that this was tested using macOS Catalina 10.15.4 and the LibreSSL (version 2.8.3) implementation of OpenSSL.

The source code is available at https://github.com/locp/blog-content/blob/master/aes-256/aes256

The Script

Examples

# Check the contents of the files we wish to encrypt:
$ cat /tmp/hello.txt
Hello, world!

# Encrypt the file:
$ aes256 -e -f /tmp/hello.txt -p 'Secret123'
INFO: Encrypting /tmp/hello.txt to /tmp/hello.txt.aes256.

# See what has happened:
$ ls -l /tmp/hello.txt.*
-rw-r--r--  1 ben.dalling  wheel  32 28 Mar 10:47 /tmp/hello.txt.aes256
$ od -c /tmp/hello.txt.aes256
0000000    S   a   l   t   e   d   _   _ 345 006   k 027   g 033 305  \0
0000020  214 210 370 217 020 245 031 354  \b 212   . 202 367 344   ^ 033
0000040

# Now let's decrypt the file and show the contents:
$ aes256 -d -f /tmp/hello.txt.aes256 -p 'Secret123'
INFO: Decrypting /tmp/hello.txt.aes256 to /tmp/hello.txt.
$ cat /tmp/hello.txt
Hello, world!

References

1. Martellaro, J. (2016) How to Strongly Encrypt a File (for free) in OS X, Available at: https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how-to-strongly-encrypt-a-file-for-free-in-os-x (Accessed: 28th March 2020).
2. Wikimedia Foundation (2020) Advanced Encryption Standard, Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard (Accessed: 28th March 2020).