PGP Decryption

[Manning_Oz]

Hi, we're doing a proof-of-concept for Alteryx, and the very first task is to decrypt a PGP encrypted file pulled from an SFTP server.

I did a forum search and this topic hasn't been discussed for almost 2 years, so I am "hoping" that maybe some new feature has been added that makes this possible.

If it can't be done natively, does anyone have any suggestions?

[WillBowman]

I am an encryption novice, but it appears there are several command line options to decrypt PGP. I would call those (via batch file) with the command line tool in alteryx.

1. cli https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH211002.html (I can't tell if this is their product or just a how to)  It is $6000

2. run batch file https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Run-a-batch-file-from-Run-Command-tool...

EDIT:

New proposal is to use python in the python tool. https://pypi.org/project/py-pgp/ 

Again, I don't really know much about decryption. But python tool and command line (which can run batch, python, C, Fortran, blah blah blah) are the best options for situations where there isn't a native solution.

[Manning_Oz]

Hi Will

Thanks for that. Yes, my research thus far indicated that either a command line or Python approach would be best.

I am hopeful of making Alteryx the default data handling platform within our organisation (currently using an array of tools, including Jitterbit, SSIS and naked code). 

Obviously there are many more tasks required other than PGP decryption, so I will find a way to convince my organisation that this particular requirement is a minor issue. If we install PGP on the Alteryx server then I should be able to handle decryption no problem.

[Powya]

Hi @Manning_Oz 

I have the same challenge, can you please let me know if you found a solution? 

Many thanks

[tgkermode]

By far the simplest method for this if you are using a PGP key / password is using the pgpy library which is based on the same tech as GnuPG but doesn't require any gpg install.

Pgpy won't be installed in alteryx so you need to run the function below from the python tool to set it up.

Then load file / key to decrypt, job done.. that simple

[Rhys_Cooper]

thank you for providing this. Please can you elaborate on how to download tool should be configured to work with this. Ive tried doing output to file location with pgp and asc suffixes to later be used as the in_file argument with no success. Should it be outputted as a blob instead? thanks

[apathetichell]

@Rhys_Cooper-> if you are retrieving a PGP encrypted file -> you would need to save it as a temp file - or save it as a blob via the download tool. If you save to a specific path you can use that path in python to unencrypt. If you save to a temp file in your download - you will need to capture that location and pass it into your python tool. If you are receiving encoded text - and not a file in your download tool - you would be able to send in just text. Does that make sense?

The short is - the code above expects a file. not a blob.

[Rhys_Cooper]

Hi @apathetichell. Thank you for your responce, it is greatly appreciated. Im currently trying a save to a specific path route which im passing into the python tool ( for posterity, this was using the alteryx read method to read the specified input connection as a dataframe and isolate the specific path using pandas .iloc method on the field) and the using that as the 'in_file' argument.

Its returning "expected ASCII armoureded pgp". ive tried this with reading it as a blob too and have confirmed the sent file is ASCII armoureded pgp. Ive tried manually putting the file format extension in when specifying the save path route (ie .pgp, asc) to no avail.

Any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[apathetichell]

My recommendation here would be to test your code in VSC locally -> using a known encrypted file on your local. Once this is working - migrate to Alteryx. This looks like a syntax issue in your PGP/Python code. Can you confirm you are using Python specific paths (your .iloc is fine you should be using it to extract the path from your Alteryx workflow) -> you may need to make sure that your paths are in c:/.../... format vs c:\...\... format -> not sure if that would lead to this issue but it could.