sym 2.6.1
### Sym — Symmetric Encryption Made Easy **Sym** is a ruby library (gem) that offers both the command line interface (CLI) and a set of rich Ruby APIs, which make it rather trivial to add encryption and decryption of sensitive data to your development or deployment flow. As a layer of additional security, you can encrypt the private key itself with a password. Unlike many other existing encryption tools, Sym focuses on getting out of the way — by offering its streamlined interface, hoping to make encryption of application secrets nearly completely transparent to the developers. For the data encryption Sym uses a symmetric 256-bit key with the `AES-256-CBC` cipher, same cipher as used by the US Government. For password-protecting the key Sym uses `AES-128-CBC` cipher. The resulting data is zlib-compressed and base64-encoded. The keys are also base64 encoded for easy copying/pasting/etc. ### Massive Time Savers Sym accomplishes encryption transparency by combining convenience features: * Sym can read the private key from multiple source types, such as: a pathname to a file, an environment variable name, a keychain entry, or CLI argument. You simply pass either of these to the `-k` flag — one flag that works for all source types * By utilizing OS-X Keychain on a Mac, Sym offers truly secure way of storing the key on a local machine, much more secure then storing it on a file system * By using a local password cache (activated with `-c`) via an in-memory provider such as memcached or `drb`, sym invocations take advantage of password cache, and only ask for a password once per a configurable time period * By using `SYM_ARGS` environment variable, where common flags can be saved. This is activated with `sym -A` * By reading the key from the default key source file `~/.sym.key` which requires no flags at all * By utilizing the `--negate` option to quickly encrypt a regular file, or decrypt an encrypted file with extension `.enc` * By implementing the `-t` (edit) mode, that opens an encrypted file in your `$EDITOR`, and replaces the encrypted version upon save & exit, optionally creating a backup. * By offering the `Sym::MagicFile` ruby API to easily read encrypted files into memory.