Before we started, I was a little busy with work and Halloween with family; If you like articles like these, clap at the top, thanks! 👏

In today’s digital landscape, securing data is more critical than ever. When building web applications with React, ensuring that sensitive data is encrypted before sending it over the network can help protect it from prying eyes. An effective way to achieve this is to use the crypto-js library for encrypting REST payloads.

Crypto-js is a popular JavaScript library that provides various cryptographic algorithms including encryption and decryption. It’s simple to use and integrates seamlessly with React apps.

First, you’ll need to set up a React project if you haven’t already. You can use Vite.js for a quick start:

npm create vite@latest encrypt-rest-payloads --template react
cd encrypt-rest-payloads
npm install crypto-js
npm install

Let’s create a simple example to encrypt a payload before sending it to a REST API.

Import Crypto-JS

First, import the necessary crypto-js functions:

import CryptoJS from 'crypto-js';

Create an encryption function

Next, create a function to encrypt your payload. For this example, we will use AES encryption:

const encryptPayload = (payload, secretKey) => {
const ciphertext = CryptoJS.AES.encrypt(JSON.stringify(payload), secretKey).toString();
return ciphertext;
};

Create a decryption function

To decrypt the payload on the server side, you will need a corresponding decryption function. Although this part is usually handled server-side, here’s how to decrypt the payload using crypto-js:

const decryptPayload = (ciphertext, secretKey) => {
const bytes = CryptoJS.AES.decrypt(ciphertext, secretKey);
const decryptedData = JSON.parse(bytes.toString(CryptoJS.enc.Utf8));
return decryptedData;
};

Encrypt and send data

Now let’s use it encryptPayload function to encrypt data before sending it via a POST request:

const secretKey = 'your-256-bit-secret';
const payload = {
username: 'user123',
password: 'securepassword',
};
const encryptedPayload = encryptPayload(payload, secretKey);
fetch(' {
method: 'POST',
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
},
body: JSON.stringify({ data: encryptedPayload }),
})
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => console.log(data))
.catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));

With Vite, you can start your development server at lightning speed:

npm run dev

This will start the Vite development server and you will be able to see your React application in action.