aespasswd(1)

✨ aespasswd(1) — General Commands Manual 🎀

Okay bestie, so the manual name here is aespasswd 💖 and it's giving "make and manage an AES keyfile" 🔐 💅

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🌸 NAME

aespasswd — used to create and manage an AES keyfile. 🦋

🧚 SYNOPSIS

aespasswd [-n] [-d] -f keyfile identity

👑 OPTIONS

• -n — create the keyfile ✨
• -d — delete the given identity from the keyfile 🗑️
• -f keyfile — the file that holds your identity/key pairs 🎀

💜 DESCRIPTION

okay so aespasswd is the go-to for making and managing files that hold identity/key pairs 🫶 it's mainly used to manage the bwctld.keys file for bwctld and the owampd.keys file for owampd 💅

if you don't use -d, aespasswd asks you for a passphrase 🙈 that passphrase gets hashed with an internal MD5 algorithm to make a key, and then the key gets saved in the keyfile under your identity. if that identity is already in there, the old key gets overwritten with the new one 😭 no cap, it's a full glow-up.

keyfiles made by aespasswd are formatted for use with BWCTL and OWAMP 🌈

🦋 KEYFILE FORMAT

aespasswd writes lines that look like this:

test 54b0c58c7ce9f2a8b551351102ee0938

so it's an identity, then whitespace, then a hex encoded 128-bit number 🔥 that's the one that works as a symmetric AES key. literally iconic.

no other text is allowed on these lines, but you can add comment lines 📝 a comment line is any line where the first non-whitespace character is #.

🍓 EXAMPLES

aespasswd -f /etc/bwctl/bwctld.keys testuser

adds a key for the identity testuser 💖 you get prompted for a passphrase. if the file doesn't exist, you'll get an error message and nothing happens 💀

aespasswd -f /etc/bwctl/bwctld.keys -n testuser

creates the file first, then does the same as above ✨ if the file already exists, you'll get an error message and nothing happens 🙈

aespasswd -f /etc/bwctl/bwctld.keys -d testuser

deletes the identity testuser from the keyfile 🗑️ if the file doesn't exist, you'll get an error message and nothing happens 😭

🔐 SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS

the keys in the keyfile are not encrypted in any way 💀 the security of these keys is totally dependent on the security of the system and the discretion of the system administrator. be careful, bestie!

🚧 RESTRICTIONS

identity names are restricted to 16 characters, and passphrases are limited to 1024 characters 📏

🔗 SEE ALSO

owping(1), owampd(1), bwctl(1), bwctld(1) and the http://e2epi.internet2.edu/owamp and http://e2epi.internet2.edu/bwctl web sites 🌐

🫶 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

this material is based in part on work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. ANI-0314723. any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF 🌸

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Source/version and date: aespasswd(1), General Commands Manual, last updated 2004 Feb 8 🎀💜 Stay iconic, bestie! 💅✨