ruby - how to encrypt text

Question

Hi,

I need to encrypt a string (from a text area) that will also be decrypted later on when it is displayed.

I'm not to concerned about it being majorly secure, but just don’t want to store the data in plain text format.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this easily in rails?

Thanks, Jon

Answer 1

Is there a ROT13 implementation in Ruby/Rails (there must be...) that's totally insecure except to human readers (and idiot savants) so seems to fit your use case.

EDIT - This is a good start for swapping out characters:

$_.tr! "A-Za-z", "N-ZA-Mn-za-m";

It asks for user input then swaps the characters.

EDIT If you're not familiar, ROT13 assigns each letter its natural number. A=1, B=2, etc. Then it adds 13 to each number, effectively spinning it half way around the alphabet. The halfway bit is great, because unlike, say, ROT12, you can just run ROT13 again to decode. One function for both. OR you could run ROT12 13 times I guess (12 * 13 = 156. 156/26 = 6.) ROT 13 is better for this though.

Answer 2

There is a RubyGem named Crypt that provides a pure Ruby implementation of a number of encryption algorithms.

Answer 3

If you're not concerned about security you can just base64-encode your string:

encoded = Base64::encode(string)
decoded = Base64::decode(encoded)

By the way it's also suitable for encoding binary data.

Answer 4

gem install encryptor

It wraps the standard Ruby OpenSSL library and allows you to use any of its algorithms.

http://github.com/shuber/encryptor