Generating Keys

Overview

This folder contains a Command-line-interface that can be used to encrypt and encode secret values in a format that can be used by the Java Connector.

For example, imagine the Connector needs to authenticate to a database using a password with a value of shh. This value can be encrypted using either the Google KMS (reccommended for productio usage) or a Java Keystore loaded from the runtime's filesystem (most useful for development purposes).

In either case, the secret value (i.e., shh) will be encrypted with a particular secret-key with a particular version of that key. The CLI will encode this value so that it can be parsed properly by the connector in order to determine the correct manner to locate keys for decryption.

Here is an example of a secret value that is both encrypted and encoded:

enc:JKS:crypto.p12:secret0:1:aes_gcm:AAAADKZPmASojt1iayb2bPy4D-Toq7TGLTN95HzCQAeJtz0=

This encoding indicates that the string represents and encoded value (because it begins with the prefix enc), was encrypted using a Java Keystore (i.e., the JKS keystore type) using a filename called crypto.p12, and using the key with an alias of secret0 and the aes_gcm encryption algorithm (which is a particular variant supported by the Connector). Next, a cipher_message encodes cipher_text as well as other meta-data used to decrypt the secret value (see here for more details).

Running the CLI

Crypto CLI is available as a docker image. To run the CLI via docker, run:

docker run -it --rm interledger4j/crypto-cli

This will run using the default embedded JKS keystore which is only meant dev purposes. Here's an example of a CLI interaction with the to encrypt the secret myEncryptionSecret:

crypto-cli:> e mySecretToEncrypt
Encoded Encrypted Secret: enc:JKS:crypto.p12:secret0:1:aes_gcm:AAAADAaP9_AwM...

To see all the available commands and config flags, run the help command inside the crypto cli.

Using Custom JKS Keystore

To run with your own custom JKS keystore it must be mounted as as volume the docker container. For example, if you had a keystore file on your local machine under /keystores/mykeystore.p12 you would run the container using:

docker run -it --rm  -v /keystores/mykeystore.p12:/app/resources/mykeystore.p12 \
interledger4j/crypto-cli

Then in the CLI, you would switch the keystore to mykeystore.p12:

crypto-cli:> jks-filename mykeystore.p12

Using GCP KMS

If you want to use GCP KMS instead of JKS, you must provide your Google Service Account key file to the crypto-cli container. For example, if I generated and downloaded my service account key file to /gcp/my-service-account.json then I would provide my key file via the following docker command:

docker run -it --rm -v /gcp/my-service-account.json:/app/gcp-credentials.json \
interledger4j/crypto-cli

Create a Keystore

To create a Keystore that the CLI can use, issue the following command to create a new keystore with an AES-256 SecretKey inside:

> keytool -keystore ./crypto.p12 -storetype PKCS12 -genseckey -alias secret0 -keyalg aes -keysize 256
> keytool -keystore ./crypto.p12 -storetype PKCS12 -list