AES Encryption with a manual key

Encryption can be really useful when transferring data between systems, especially when this information has to travel over the internet. There are a number of ways to encrypt things and a number of different protocols that you can use depending on your needs. It doesn’t seem to be terribly well documented out on the web, […]
Last updated: August 1, 2022

Encryption can be really useful when transferring data between systems, especially when this information has to travel over the internet. There are a number of ways to encrypt things and a number of different protocols that you can use depending on your needs. It doesn’t seem to be terribly well documented out on the web, and there are lots of people out there who seem to have had a lot of problems with it. Here are some of the available encryption algorithms and their relative speeds: In our latest project we are receiving data through a single URL variable and decrypting it to get some personal information. In the initial stages we ran across a few problems:

  • The key that was provided by the other party was requested to be padded with spaces to 24 chars. CF doesn’t seem to recognise any character that is used to pad the key. First we used 14 spaces on the 10 char string, and CF reported a length of 7 bytes. Its like CF cant even see the extra spaces. So I replaced the spaces with 3’s and I get an 18 byte string. What in the weird?
  • The AES key you use cannot have ^ or & in it. CF chokes on them. However + and = seem to be OK.

Duncan Isaksen-Loxton

Educated as a web developer, with over 20 years of internet based work and experience, Duncan is a Google Workspace Certified Collaboration Engineer and a WordPress expert.
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