Introduction

The package intends to provide a consistent interface to encrypt/decrypt strings, R objects, files. This is based on the excellent packages sodium and base64enc. Currently, only symmetric key encryption (same key to encrypt and decrypt) is used.

Design

There are four functions and their (inverses).

• encryt_string (decrypt_string)
• encryt_object (decrypt_object)
• encryt_file (decrypt_file)
• save_object (retrieve_object)

The following table summarizes their functionality:

Examples

library("safer")

String

temp <- encrypt_string("hello, how are you", key = "secret")
all(
  is.character(temp)
  , decrypt_string(temp, "secret") == "hello, how are you"
  , class(try(decrypt_string(temp, "nopass"), silent = TRUE)) == "try-error")

## [1] TRUE

Henceforth, we shall default password: pass.

Object

temp <- encrypt_object(1:3)
all(
  is.raw(temp)
  , decrypt_object(temp) == 1:3)

## [1] TRUE

temp <- encrypt_object(iris, ascii = TRUE)
all(
  is.character(temp)
  , decrypt_object(temp) == iris
  , identical(decrypt_object(temp), iris))

## [1] TRUE

rm(temp)

File

 write.table(iris, "iris.csv")
 all(
   encrypt_file("iris.csv", "iris_encrypted.bin")
   , file.exists("iris_encrypted.bin")
   , decrypt_file("iris_encrypted.bin", "iris_2.csv")
   , file.exists("iris_2.csv")
   , tools::md5sum("iris_2.csv") == tools::md5sum("iris.csv")
   , unlink("iris.csv") == 0
   , unlink("iris_2.csv") == 0
   , unlink("iris_encrypted.bin") == 0
 )

## [1] TRUE

 write.table(iris, "iris.csv")
 all(
   encrypt_file("iris.csv", "iris_encrypted.txt", ascii = TRUE)
   , file.exists("iris_encrypted.txt")
   , decrypt_file("iris_encrypted.txt", "iris_2.csv", ascii = TRUE)
   , file.exists("iris_2.csv")
   , tools::md5sum("iris_2.csv") == tools::md5sum("iris.csv")
   , unlink("iris.csv") == 0
   , unlink("iris_2.csv") == 0
   , unlink("iris_encrypted.txt") == 0
 )

## [1] TRUE

Save

 all(
   save_object(iris, conn = "iris_safer.bin")
   , identical(retrieve_object(conn = "iris_safer.bin"), iris)
   , unlink("iris_safer.bin") == 0
 )

## [1] TRUE

 all(
   save_object(iris, conn = "iris_safer_2.txt", ascii = TRUE)
   , identical(retrieve_object(conn = "iris_safer_2.txt", ascii = TRUE), iris)
   , unlink("iris_safer_2.txt") == 0
 )

## [1] TRUE