Can you keep a secret? Andrie de Vries^1 and Gábor Csárdi^2 1. Senior Programme Manager, Algorithms and Data Science, Microsoft 2. Independent consultant
Keywords: Asymmetric encryption, Public key encryption
When you use R to connect to a database, cloud computing service or other API, you must supply passwords, for example database credentials, authentication keys, etc.
It is easy to inadvertently leak your passwords and other secrets, e.g. accidentally adding your secrets to version control or logs.
A new package, secret solves this problem by allowing you to encrypt and encrypt secrets using public key encryption. The package is available at github [@secret] and soon also on CRAN.
If you attend this session, you will learn:

• Patterns for inadvertently leak secrets
• The essentials of public key cryptography: how to create an asymmetric key pair (public and private key)
• How to create a vault with encrypted secrets using the secret package
• How to share these secrets with your collaborators by encrypting the secret with their public key
• How you can do all of this in 5 lines of R code

This session will appeal to all R users who must use passwords to connect to services.

References