Why won't ruby-mcrypt accept an array as a key? - ruby

Question

Hello I am having trouble encrypting using an array as the key and the value with the ruby-mcrypt gem. The gem lets me use an array for the key fine, cipher = Mcrypt.new("rijndael-256", :ecb, secret) works. But it will give me an error when I try to encrypt. I've tried many things but no luck. Does anyone know if Mcrypt just doesn't like encrypting with an array?
require 'mcrypt'
def encrypt(plain, secret)
cipher = Mcrypt.new("rijndael-256", :ecb, secret)
cipher.padding = :zeros
encrypted = cipher.encrypt(plain)
p encrypted
encrypted.unpack("H*").first.to_s.upcase
end
array_to_encrypt = [16, 0, 0, 0, 50, 48, 49, 55, 47, 48, 50, 47, 48, 55, 32, 50, 50, 58, 52, 54, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
key_array = [65, 66, 67, 68, 49, 50, 51, 52, 70, 71, 72, 73, 53, 54, 55, 56]
result = encrypt(array_to_encrypt, key_array)
p "RESULT IS #{result}"
The output is as follows:
Mcrypt::RuntimeError: Could not initialize mcrypt: Key length is not legal.
I traced this error to here in the ruby-mcrypt gem but don't understand it enough to figure out why I am getting the error message. Any help or insights would be amazing. Thanks!

Answer 1

The library doesn't support arrays. You'll need to use Strings instead:
def binary(byte_array)
byte_array.pack('C*')
end
array_to_encrypt = [16, 0, 0, 0, 50, 48, 49, 55, 47, 48, 50, 47, 48, 55, 32, 50, 50, 58, 52, 54, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
key_array = [65, 66, 67, 68, 49, 50, 51, 52, 70, 71, 72, 73, 53, 54, 55, 56]
result = encrypt(binary(array_to_encrypt), binary(key_array))
p "RESULT IS #{result}"