Decrypting private keys generated with StrongCoin

25 October 11

One of the key benefits of StrongCoin is that you can take your private key away anytime you want. The private key in StrongCoin is AES encrypted and we've maintained compatability with OpenSSL.

The screenshot below shows you how an AES-encrypted private key looks in StrongCoin.

Decrypting the key in StrongCoin

You can decrypt the key within StrongCoin at any time by supplying your password. Click on your account in the Accounts List screen, then select Decode Private Key to open the decode popup.

Decrypting on the command line

We use the Gibberish AES Javascript library to generate our AES encryption. Copy the Base64-encoded encrypted key and pipe it directly to OpenSSL:

echo "U2..." | openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -a -k PASSWORD -md md5

Replace U2... with the full encoded key and PASSWORD with the password used to encrypt it. Keep the key inside the quotes. For better protection, avoid putting a real password directly in your shell history.

And you should get something like the results below.

Encrypted Keys and Paper Wallets

You can decrypt StrongCoin-encrypted private keys without using StrongCoin.

Additionally our paper wallet feature allows you to keep a copy of your keys safely offline.