Step 5: Create a shared secret key

To encrypt the data tables, the collaboration participants must agree upon and securely share a shared secret key.

The shared secret key must be at least 256-bits (32 bytes). You can specify a larger key, but it won't give you any additional security.

Important

Remember, the key and collaboration ID used for encryption and decryption must be identical for all collaboration participants.

The following sections provide examples of console commands for generating a shared secret key saved as secret.key in the respective terminal's current working directory.

Example: Key generation using OpenSSL

For a common general purpose cryptography library, run the following command to create a shared secret key.

openssl rand 32 > secret.key

If you're using Windows and don't have OpenSSL installed, you can generate keys using the example described in Example: Key generation on Windows using PowerShell.

Example: Key generation on Windows using PowerShell

For PowerShell, a terminal application available on Windows, run the following command to create a shared secret key.

$bs = New-Object Byte[](32); [Security.Cryptography.RandomNumberGenerator]::Create().GetBytes($bs); Set-Content 'secret.key' -Encoding Byte -Value $bs