how do I encrypt data in R?

Question

I am adding a sentry handler to the R logging package. currently django-sentry validates the client (the application sending log records) based on a shared key which travels in clear text in a secured channel.

I was wondering if it was possible to do encryption from R, preferably asymmetric, public key based, but I find nothing relevant.

all right, not "if it was possible", but "how to do that" and whether someone already did this.

---

after interaction with the author of django-sentry, we opted for hmac, which I have implemented within the digest R package (version 0.5+ contains it). This does not answer the question "how to encrypt data using R", but it solves the problem which formed the base for my initial question.

At this point I am not any more actively working at asymmetric encription in R, however, if you are interested in it and you want to contribute ideas or code, please leave a note here!

Answer 1

You may also find suitable function in the PKI package from the author Simon Urbanek.

This package provides PKI functions such as verifyig certificates, RSA encription and signing which can be used to build PKI infrastructure and perform cryptographic tasks.

Example code from the tutorial:

require(PKI)
key <- PKI.genRSAkey(2048)
x <- charToRaw("Hello, world!")
e <- PKI.encrypt(x, key)
y <- PKI.decrypt(e, key)
stopifnot(identical(x, y))
print(rawToChar(y))

gives as result: [1] "Hello, world!"

while the encrypted message e was:

  [1] 36 83 d3 70 0a 67 b5 05 a6 40 1e 37 28 b9 4e 28 f1 31 92 14 2c 35 c8 8a 61 93 1e 04 62 01 da 3b 2b a0 75 1c 10 58 26
 [40] e4 77 da 7a 47 3f 4e 44 29 8e 97 6f 62 b1 98 44 ba 18 ef 57 1e 9e 9c 27 a8 6e 9c 7b c7 8b c0 c3 a3 00 e2 67 98 8b 6e
 [79] 1a 93 c6 d6 ed 4b 54 e5 7a 07 d7 06 ef a6 bb 36 6a 7f 57 06 b9 15 03 f6 51 3f 07 48 cb f4 2d 25 15 be 42 de f4 8a 06
[118] 72 89 b1 e3 04 d3 ec 80 99 f0 66 0f 84 e1 b5 af 23 24 a1 36 8e 62 65 ae 19 fb 77 d1 36 06 ae 71 95 ee 57 aa 68 5a 6b
[157] 4e 28 ba a2 0d 17 78 11 6c 7f 1b b3 ce 31 65 a9 d3 71 89 76 f9 19 a0 7a bf 02 dd c9 1f cb 9c 39 25 d4 48 a2 23 83 26
[196] b4 a9 b1 40 f5 1d 46 21 35 12 52 73 09 9b f3 52 e1 9e 0d 2a 9b ff 70 81 41 24 49 ed 58 b2 61 dc 3e c9 b3 b2 b1 37 e0
[235] 48 76 18 bf b0 e5 c2 d9 2b 92 2f 6b 49 dd e0 93 b7 10 f8 ba d2 8a

Answer 2

Does this help you ahead: digest package? It holds several hashing functions. To my knowledge, asymmetric encryption is the same as hashing...

Answer 3

This is an old thread but in case others come across this, it seems there's a secure package by Hadley. The readme states:

The secure package provides a secure vault within a publicly available code repository. It allows you to store private information in a public repository so that only select people can read it. This is particularly useful for testing because you can now store private credentials in your public repo, without them being readable by the world.

Secure is built on top of asymmetric (public/private key) encryption. Secure generates a random master key and uses that to encrypt (with AES256) each file in vault/. The master key is not stored unencrypted anywhere; instead, an encrypted copy is stored for each user, using their own public key. Each user can than decrypt the encrypted master key using their private key, then use that to decrypt each file.