AES Encrypt in CryptoJS and decrypt in Coldfusion

There seem to be two issues:

1. CryptoJS is not using your variable as the key. As @Miguel-F mentioned, when you pass in a string, “it’s treated as a passphrase and used to derive [the] actual key and IV”. Both are randomly generated, which is why your encrypted result keeps changing. But more importantly, this means that CryptoJS is using a completely different key than the one in your CF code and that is why decrypt() fails. (At least it is part of the reason …)

2. The second problem is that in addition to the algorithm “AES”, there are two other encryption settings which must match: mode and padding scheme. While CryptoJS and ColdFusion use the same defaults for padding scheme, the “modes” are different:

   • ColdFusion uses “ECB”. “AES” is actually short for "AES/ECB/PKCS5Padding"
   • CryptoJS uses “CBC”, which requires an additional iv (initialization vector) value.

You need to ensure all three settings are the same on both sides. Try using CBC mode in CF, since it is more secure than ECB anyway. Note: It requires adding an IV value.

CF Code:

<!--- this is the base64 encrypted value from CryptoJS ---> 
<cfset encrypted = "J2f66oiDpZkFlQu26BDKL6ZwgNwN7T3ixst4JtMyNIY=">
<cfset rawString = "[email protected]">
<cfset base64Key = "MTIzNDU2NzgxMjM0NTY3OA==">
<cfset base64IV = "EBESExQVFhcYGRobHB0eHw==">

<cfset ivBytes = binaryDecode(base64IV, "base64")>
<cfoutput>
    #decrypt(encrypted, base64Key, "AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding", "base64", ivBytes)#
</cfoutput>

CryptoJS: (Adjusted Original Example)

<script src="http://crypto-js.googlecode.com/svn/tags/3.1.2/build/rollups/aes.js"></script>
<script src="http://crypto-js.googlecode.com/svn/tags/3.1.2/build/components/enc-base64-min.js"></script>
<script>
    var text = "#rawString#";
    var key = CryptoJS.enc.Base64.parse("#base64Key#");
    var iv  = CryptoJS.enc.Base64.parse("#base64IV#");

    var encrypted = CryptoJS.AES.encrypt(text, key, {iv: iv});
    console.log(encrypted.toString());

    var decrypted = CryptoJS.AES.decrypt(encrypted, key, {iv: iv});
    console.log(decrypted.toString(CryptoJS.enc.Utf8));
</script>

Edit:

All that said, what do you mean by the client “has no choice but to use CryptoJS to perform the encryption”? Why cannot they use server side encryption? I am not an encryption expert, but doing encryption in javascript, and exposing the key on the client, does not sound wildly secure to begin with …