ansible-vault format

Hii,

I’ve always wondered what the format of the ansible vault is, more specifically why it consists of only numbers, as that seems like an insufficient way to represent data.
It is as if the content has to go through some medium that can only understand digits?

Dick

The encryption used is AES256, but what you are seeing in the vault output is not the direct result of the encryption. The result currently goes through binascii.hexlify 2 times, resulting in only having numbers. We are looking at removing the 2nd pass in the future.

I was just reading https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/vault_guide/vault_using_encrypted_content.html#ansible-vault-payload-format-1-1-1-2 trying to figure out quite how that resulted in numerals only… :slight_smile: