Using key with pgcrypto

[techthumb]

Hi,

I have a scenario where we have data that is already encrypted using a different key.

I now want to migrate this data to use SymmetricEncryption & the key generated by SymmetricEncryption

I am using the pgcrypto package in postgres to migrate this data.
The decrypt function works okay as the data was encrypted using pgp_sym_encrypt

My migration decrypts the column and then tries to encrypt the column using SymmetricEncryption.cipher.key

When the migration runs, I get the following error

PG::CharacterNotInRepertoire: ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x96

My key is: \v\x96\x1C\xAE\xAD\xD6r\x96f\xD4kJT\xEB#\x01\xDC\x06\x98\xD3f\xA0+z\xF3?qg\x18\xE1\x1D\xD8

I know my questing is vague, but can you suggest some pointers to how you might perform this migration?

Thanks,

Kunal

[reidmorrison]

I am not familiar with pgcrypto in Postgres. The problem though sounds like a general encoding issue, where the data is being marked as UTF8, but contains invalid UTF-8 data.
You can try converting the data to binary before decrypting it.

"non-utf8-string".force_encoding("ASCII-8BIT")

[techthumb]

Thanks for the quick response.

Yes, I agree that this is an encoding issue.

I think it's mostly having problem decoding the SymmetricEncryption key.

Running the following command produces weird errors on the screen.

rails runner 'puts SymmetricEncryption.cipher.send(:key)'

����r�f�kJT�#���f�+z�?qg��

Is there a way that I can convert this key to a plain text equivalent?

[reidmorrison]

It is not an error, it is displaying binary data. The encryption key is made up of the entire binary range based on it's key length.