Decrypt encrypted information sent to support@2i2c.org

Decrypt encrypted information sent to support@2i2c.org#

Sometimes community representatives need to send us encrypted information - usually credentials for cloud access or an authentication system. We use age (pronounced aghe) to allow such information to be encrypted and then sent to use in a way that anyone on the team can decrypt, rather than the information be tied to a single engineer.

Pre-requisites#

Before you can decrypt received messages, you need the following pre-requisites setup.

  1. Install age

  2. Install sops

  3. Authenticate with gcloud so sops can decrypt the private age key kept in the repository.

These are all one-time tasks, and (2) and (3) are generally required for deployments to work.

Decrypt received message#

The encrypted message looks something like

-----BEGIN AGE ENCRYPTED FILE-----
YWdlLWVuY3J5cHRpb24ub3JnL3YxCi0+IFgyNTUxOSB5cDRlMzVzWHpWU1JIeVBj
YnBqOHc5NzA3ZTZiNlljSkRDMFpyMkNUWVhBCmRBb1ltQVNPVExNK1ppbVY4OC93
OVBqUmtMQytsQkpMZkxDbXZ2R0d6ZzQKLS0tIGlGNktqWDFZMDZaYTVFTUIyNmZD
dnY1aHZGMFRpb2djMmViSU5qNkJ0M1EKtRkajujtLCgCZkPRQEGanAavNj/GQc/g
xQemDwYveQVheTyc9zA=
-----END AGE ENCRYPTED FILE-----

Once you have the encrypted contents, you can decrypt it by:

  1. Run deployer decrypt-age from the infrastructure repo checkout

  2. Paste the encrypted message in your terminal

  3. Press enter, and then Ctrl+D

  4. You’ll see the decrypted output!

Alternatively, you can also run deployer decrypt-age --encrypted-file-path <path-to-encrypted-file> if the encrypted message is stored in a file