infos = Information about crypto plugin is in keys below
infos/author = Peter Nirschl peter.nosp@m..nir.nosp@m.schl@.nosp@m.gmai.nosp@m.l.com
infos/licence = BSD
infos/provides = filefilter crypto
infos/needs =
infos/recommends =
infos/placements = postgetstorage presetstorage #ifdef ELEKTRA_CRYPTO_API_GCRYPT {#src_plugins_crypto_README_md}
infos/status = unittest configurable memleak experimental unfinished discouraged #else
infos/status = unittest configurable memleak experimental unfinished discouraged #endif
infos/metadata = crypto/encrypt
infos/description = Cryptographic operations

Introduction

This plugin is a filter plugin allowing Elektra to encrypt values before they are persisted and to decrypt values after they have been read from a backend.

The idea is to provide protection of sensible values before they are persisted. This means the value of a key needs to be encrypted before it is written to a file or a database. It also needs to be decrypted whenever an admissible access (read) is being performed.

The users of Elektra should not be bothered too much with the internals of the cryptographic operations. Also the cryptographic keys must never be exposed to the outside of the crypto module.

The crypto plugin supports different libraries as provider for the cryptographic operations. At the moment the following crypto APIs are supported:

OpenSSL (libcrypto)
libgcrypt
Botan

Dependencies

#ifdef ELEKTRA_CRYPTO_API_GCRYPT

libgcrypt20-dev or libgcrypt-devel #endif #ifdef ELEKTRA_CRYPTO_API_OPENSSL
libssl-dev or openssl-devel #endif #ifdef ELEKTRA_CRYPTO_API_BOTAN
libbotan1.10-dev or botan-devel #endif

GnuPG (GPG)

GPG is a runtime dependency for all crypto plugin variants. Either the gpg or the gpg2 binary should be installed when using the plugin. Note that gpg2 will be prefered if both versions are available. The GPG binary can be configured in the plugin configuration as /gpg/bin (see GPG Configuration below). If no such configuration is provided, the plugin will look at the PATH environment variable to find the GPG binaries.

How to compile

The following compile variants are available:

crypto_gcrypt
crypto_openssl
crypto_botan

Add "crypto" and the variants, that you want (you can add one of them or all), to the PLUGINS variable in CMakeCache.txt and re-run cmake.

In order to add all compile variants you can add "CRYPTO" to the PLUGINS variable.

An example CMakeCache.txt may contain the following variable:

PLUGINS=crypto;crypto_gcrypt;crypto_openssl;crypto_botan

or it may look like:

PLUGINS=CRYPTO

Manual Library Setup

If you have a custom built OpenSSL or libgcrypt on your system, you can tell CMake to use those by setting the following CMake variables.

For a custom OpenSSL location set:

OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR to the library's header files
OPENSSL_LIBRARIES to the library's binary file

For a custom libgcrypt location set:

LIBGCRYPT_INCLUDE_DIR to the library's header files
LIBGCRYPT_LIBRARIES to the library's binary file

For a custom Botan development file location set:

BOTAN_INCLUDE_DIRS to Botan's header files (includes)
BOTAN_LIBRARIES to Botan's binary file

Mac OS X

Both variants of the plugin compile under Mac OS X "El Capitan" (Version 10.11.3 (15D21)).

For the crypto_gcrypt variant download and install either MacPorts or Homebrew. Use one of those tools to download and install libgcrypt. If you choose MacPorts, you can set the CMake variables like this:

LIBGCRYPT_INCLUDE_DIR to /opt/local/include/
LIBGCRYPT_LIBRARIES to /opt/local/lib/libgcrypt.dylib

The CMake command might look something like:

cmake -DLIBGCRYPT_INCLUDE_DIR="/opt/local/include/" -DLIBGCRYPT_LIBRARIES="/opt/local/lib/libgcrypt.dylib" -DPLUGINS="crypto;crypto_gcrypt;" /path_to_elektra_src

For the crypto_openssl variant a custom-built OpenSSL library is neccessary as the MacPorts or Homebrew variants do not seem to work. Download the latest version of the OpenSSL library from the project homepage and compile it. Copy the header files and the binary files to a location where all users can access them.

Set the CMake variables OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR and OPENSSL_LIBRARIES to your desired location.

Restrictions

At the moment the plugin will only run on UNIX/Linux-like systems, that provide implementations for fork () and execv ().

Examples

To mount a backend with the gcrypt plugin variant that uses the GPG key 9CCC3B514E196C6308CCD230666260C14A525406, use:

kdb mount test.ecf user/t crypto_gcrypt "crypto/key=9CCC3B514E196C6308CCD230666260C14A525406"

Now you can specify a key user/t/a and protect its content by using:

kdb set user/t/a
kdb setmeta user/t/a crypto/encrypt 1
kdb set user/t/a "secret"

The value of user/t/a will be stored encrypted. But you can still access the original value using kdb get:

kdb get user/t/a

Configuration

GPG Configuration

The path to the gpg binary can be specified in

/gpg/bin

The GPG recipient keys can be specified as /gpg/key directly. If you want to use more than one key, just enumerate like:

/gpg/key/#0
/gpg/key/#1

If more than one key is defined, every owner of the corresponding private key can decrypt the values of the backend. This might be useful if applications run with their own user but the administrator has to update the configuration. The administrator then only needs the public key of the application user in her keyring, set the values and the application will be able to decrypt the values.

Cryptographic Operations

The length of the master password that protects all the other keys can be set in:

/crypto/masterpasswordlength

The number of iterations that are to be performed in the PBKDF2 call can be set in:

/crypto/iterations

Library Shutdown

The following key must be set to "1" within the plugin configuration, if the plugin should shut down the crypto library:

/shutdown

Per default shutdown is disabled to prevent applications like the qt-gui from crashing. Shutdown is enabled in the unit tests to prevent memory leaks.