life-research / csv-crypt

Line-by-line CSV Encryption Tool

CSV Crypt

A command line tool which encrypts a CSV file line by line so that it's possible to exchange identifiers without being able to inspect the rest of the data.

Install

Download an archive for your OS:

• Windows
• Linux

Unpack the archive. It will create a directory called csv-crypt-0.5. Open console in this directory and run csv-crypt.

Usage

Usage: csv-crypt [-g] [-e -k key in-file out-file] [-d -k key in-file out-file]
  -k, --key KEY                                32-byte hex encoded key
  -e, --encrypt
  -d, --decrypt
  -g, --gen-key
      --in-encoding ENCODING     UTF-8
      --in-separator SEPARATOR   (default \,)
      --in-tab-separated                       Input file is tab separated
      --out-separator SEPARATOR  (default \,)
      --out-tab-separated                      Output file should be tab separated
      --out-optimize-win                       Optimize the output for Office 2010+
  -h, --help

Generate Encryption Key

Generates a random key with 32 bytes of entropy using a cryptographically secure random number generator.

csv-crypt --gen-key

Encrypt a CSV File

The default encoding UTF-8 and the default separator , is used.

csv-crypt --encrypt --key <key> <in-file> <out-file> 

The encrypted values are encoded in Base64 so that they contain only printable characters which are available in almost all charsets.

Decrypt a CSV File

The default encoding UTF-8 and the default separator , is used.

csv-crypt --decrypt --key <key> <in-file> <out-file> 

Encrypt an Excel Unicode Text File

Excel can save spreadsheets as an Unicode Text File. This is the safest way to feed a spreadsheet into csv-crypt. An example of such a file can be found in the repository as examples/excel-2013-unicode-text.txt. Because the file is tab-separated, you have to use the command line switch --in-tab-separated:

csv-crypt --encrypt --key <key> --in-tab-separated <in-file> <out-file> 

The output file will be still comma-separated.

Optimize the Output File for Office 2010+

In order to produce a output file which can be opened in Excel 2010+, you can use the command line switch --out-optimize-win. Please be sure to also use the csv file extension. The resulting file opens correctly in Excel.

Build

To create a ZIP for Windows and a tar.gz for Linux run:

make all

The files will be in target/win and target/linux.

License

Copyright © 2017 Leipzig Research Centre for Civilization Diseases (LIFE)

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.