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ankush82's avatar
ankush82
Icon for Bronze I rankBronze I
11 days ago

Modern Encryption: Demonstrate your skills

I am in the final lab of this collection and the step 3 I need to encrypt the file using aes 256 encryption using the following command and similar other commands I am using for setup 4 & 5 however the commands execute succesfully and a encrypted file is generated however a key file is not generated to decrypt the remaining for encrypted file to complete the lab. I need the help to solve this lab and get the badge.

step 3- openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -a -pbkdf2 -nosalt -in plaintext_1.txt -out plaintext_1.enc

step 4- Encrypt a file using RC4

openssl enc -rc4 -d -pbkdf2 -nosalt -in plaintext_2.txt -out plaintext_2.enc

step 5- Encrypt a file using RC4

openssl enc --des-ede3-cbc -d -pbkdf2 -nosalt -in plaintext_3.txt -out plaintext_3.enc

3 Replies

  • The lab has changed a little since I last looked at it in September 2020 - but I've just worked through my notes and completed it without any issue - so it seems to be working OK. 

    For step 5 - you should be passing a "-k" argument with the password (key), as per the instructions in plaintext_3.txt?

     

    • autom8on's avatar
      autom8on
      Icon for Bronze III rankBronze III

      Not sure if you're also missing a "-e"? Won't the "-d" force it to try and decrypt rather than encrypt? 

      My command line for Q5 was:

      openssl enc -e -des-ede3-cbc -in plaintext_3.txt -out plaintext_3.enc -k ShowMeHow2Encrypt -nosalt -pbkdf2

  • Problem starts from the step 3 itself since I need to encrypt the plaintext1, plaintext2 and plaintext3 to get the key from each step and with the commands mentioned in my post I am able to encrypt but it is not generating the key which required to complete further steps. For step 5 yeah it was typo actually