sym 2.8.4

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. Sym accomplishes encryption transparency by combining convenience features: 1) 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. 2) 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, 3) 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, 4) By using SYM_ARGS environment variable, where common flags can be saved. This is activated with sym -A, 5) By reading the key from the default key source file ~/.sym.key which requires no flags at all, 6) By utilizing the --negate option to quickly encrypt a regular file, or decrypt an encrypted file with extension .enc 7) 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. 8) By offering the Sym::MagicFile ruby API to easily read encrypted files into memory.