Laravel-RSA-Demo

An app to use RSA encryption as part of Laravel API operation

User

Endpoint	api/users/register
Request Type	POST
Description	Creates a new User, generates public and private keys for user which is stored in database, and also stored in storage/keys folder
Field	Limits	Required
email	Standard email	YES
username	At least one character	YES
password	At least 6 characters	YES

Message

Endpoint	api/messages/decrypt
Request Type	POST
Description	Encrypts and decrypts dummy test, proof of concept for RSA encryption
Field	Limits	Required

Installation

clone repository Then install dependencies using Composer

$ composer install

Copy .env.example to .env

$ cp .env.example .env

Add your database credentials as appropriate

$ php artisan key:generate

$ php artisan migrate

$ php artisan storage:link

move the keys folder in project root to storage/app in project root, this application depends on the keys here for encryption

Run

Run the application with the following command

$ php artisan serve

Packages used

Apart from the default Laravel packages, I used Vlucas Pikirasa package for RSA as the package was quite adaptable to the use case at hand.

What my API endpoints achieve

I created a users/register endpoint which takes username, email and password as payload and creates a user, plus assigns public and private keys to the user, which is added to the public_key and private_key fields in the users table.

Also created messages/decrypt endpoint which has no payloads, but proves that encryption/decryption is possible with RSA if public and private keys are stored in a textfile, the keys used for this are found on folder keys/default.

What I have learnt

I spent lots of time trying to store and use public and private keys as text/string, this is almost impossible as spaces/text identation mean a lot for .pem files. I finally used files for storage and I was able to encrypt and decrypt a random string.