So What Does A Modern Encryption Key Look Like?

So what does an encryption key look like these days? Well, it depends on whether your a computer or a human. For a computer, it is just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, but for humans, we are not so good at interpreting binary. We also need a bit more information about the key, such as when it was created.

And so the JSON format is often used to view a key, and Google Tink is a great place to view the key. With this we can define a symmetric key, and where we give the key and ID, and then define the key type (as we can use a range of encryption methods). In the following we use an AES GCM key: [link]

{
    "primaryKeyId": 1331912396,
    "key": [{
        "keyData": {
            "typeUrl": "type.googleapis.com/google.crypto.tink.AesGcmKey",
            "keyMaterialType": "SYMMETRIC",
            "value": "GhBpskWWTrE27e2w67X4TzfS"
        },
        "outputPrefixType": "TINK",
        "keyId": 1331912396,
        "status": "ENABLED"
    }]
}

The key is “GhBpskWWTrE27e2w67X4TzfS”. The hexadecimal format is:

1A1069B245964EB136EDEDB0EBB5F84F37D2

and which is 36 hex characters, and which is 144 bits. This gives 128 bits for the key and a few extra bits for some parameters.