Encrypting and Decrypting Data in Go

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Today we’re going to talk about a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts: cryptography. Specifically, how to encrypt and decrypt data using Go, the language of choice for cool kids everywhere. But first, let’s take a moment to appreciate this beautiful syntax:

// Package declaration
package main

// Import necessary packages for cryptography
import (
    "crypto/aes" // Package for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm
    "crypto/cipher" // Package for implementing cryptographic ciphers
    "crypto/rand" // Package for generating random numbers
    "encoding/hex" // Package for encoding and decoding hexadecimal strings
)

// Main function
func main() {
    // ...
}

Wow, that’s some serious code right there. Let’s break it down: we’re importing the `aes`, `cipher`, and `rand` packages from the `crypto` library, as well as the `hex` package for encoding our encrypted data in hex format (because why not?).

Now that we have all of our fancy imports, let’s get to work. Before anything else: generating some random data to encrypt. We can do this using Go’s built-in `rand` package like so:

// Import the necessary libraries for encryption and encoding
import (
	"crypto" // import the crypto library for encryption
	"encoding/hex" // import the hex package for encoding in hex format
)

// Generate 16 bytes (128 bits) of random data
buf := make([]byte, 16) // create a byte slice with a length of 16
_, err := rand.Read(buf) // use the rand package to generate random data and store it in the byte slice
if err != nil { // check for any errors
    panic("Failed to generate random data") // if there is an error, panic and stop the program
}

We’re using the `rand.Read()` function to read 16 bytes (which is equivalent to 128 bits) into our buffer, and if there’s an error we’re panicking because who needs errors anyway?

Next up: encryption! We can use Go’s built-in AES cipher for this. Here’s some code that encrypts the data using a key of your choice (just replace `YOUR_KEY` with whatever you want):

// Import necessary packages for AES encryption
import (
    "crypto/aes"
    "crypto/cipher"
    "crypto/rand"
)

// Generate a random buffer of data
buf := make([]byte, 16)
_, err := rand.Read(buf)
if err != nil {
    panic("Failed to generate random data")
}

// Create a new AES cipher using a key of your choice
key := []byte("YOUR_KEY")
block, err := aes.NewCipher(key)
if err != nil {
    panic("Failed to create cipher")
}

// Create a new CBC mode cipher using the AES cipher
cbc := cipher.NewCBCCrypto(block)

// Generate a random initialization vector (IV)
iv := make([]byte, aes.BlockSize)
_, err = rand.Read(iv)
if err != nil {
    panic("Failed to generate IV")
}

// Encrypt the data using the CBC mode cipher and IV
encrypted := make([]byte, len(buf))
cbc.Encrypt(encrypted, iv[:], buf)

// Print the encrypted data
fmt.Println("Encrypted data:", encrypted)

We’re creating an AES cipher using our key (which is just a byte slice), and then wrapping it in CBC mode for some extra security. We’re also generating a random IV (initialization vector) to use with the encryption process. Finally, we’re encrypting our data using `cbc.Encrypt()`, which takes three arguments: the output buffer, an input buffer containing the IV, and the plaintext data that we want to encrypt.

Now let’s take a look at decryption! Here’s some code that does just that:

// Create a new cipher block using AES encryption
block, err := aes.NewCipher([]byte("YOUR_KEY"))
if err != nil {
    panic("Failed to create cipher")
}

// Create a new CBC cipher using the cipher block
cbc := cipher.NewCBCCrypto(block)

// Create a buffer to store the decrypted data
decrypted := make([]byte, len(encrypted))

// Extract the initialization vector (IV) from the encrypted data
iv := encrypted[:aes.BlockSize]

// Decrypt the data using CBC mode, passing in the decrypted buffer, IV, and encrypted data
_, err = cbc.Decrypt(decrypted, iv[:], encrypted[aes.BlockSize:])
if err != nil {
    panic("Failed to decrypt data")
}

We’re doing pretty much the same thing as before, but this time we’re using `cbc.Decrypt()`, which takes three arguments: the output buffer (which will contain our plaintext data), an input buffer containing the IV that was used during encryption, and the encrypted data itself.

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