Reading the key file on Windows

Discussion related to AES Crypt, the file encryption software for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Java.
secme
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Joined: Thu Oct 09, 2014 3:02 am

Re: Reading the key file on Windows

Post by secme »

This isn't working for me. Addmittedly my key was generated in puttygen iirc, and then I used it to encrypt the contents of my message with aespipe on Linux. I am trying to decrypt it to change some things on my windows machine using aescrypt but not having much luck, when I put the password in it comes back with Error in read_password: password too long.

Any assistance available?
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paulej
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Re: Reading the key file on Windows

Post by paulej »

In AES Crypt, there really is no concept of a "key", but just a password. On the Linux version, there is a program called "aescrypt_keygen", which basically creates a file with a random string of characters inside. That file could quite literally be opened with something like notepad and the contents copied and pasted and used as the password on Windows. That is deliberate, of course, as we want AES Crypt to be easy to use.

"aespipe" is not a part of the AES Crypt software on Linux. I'm guessing that the encrypted file you have is not compatible with AES Crypt. The Linux version of "aescrypt" and the Windows version of "aescrypt" are compatible with each other. However, others tools that can encrypt files using the AES block cipher (e.g., aespipe, openssl, etc.) are not compatible.
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