ENCRYPTKEY= Data Set Option

specifies a key value for AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption.

Note:

You cannot change the key value on an AES-encrypted data set without re-creating the data set.

Syntax

ENCRYPTKEY=key-value

Details

Specifies to assign an encryption key value. You must specify the ENCRYPTKEY= data set option when you are using ENCRYPT=AES. The key value can be up to 64 bytes long. To create an ENCRYPTKEY= key value with or without quotation marks, follow these rules:

No quotation marks:

use alphanumeric characters and underscores only
can be up to 64 bytes long
use uppercase and lowercase letters
must start with a letter
cannot include blank spaces
is not case sensitive

%let mykey=abcdefghi12;
encryptkey=&mykey
encryptkey=key_value
encryptkey=key_value1

Single quotation marks:

use alphanumeric, special, and DBCS characters
can be up to 64 bytes long
use uppercase and lowercase letters
can include blank spaces, but cannot contain all blanks
is case sensitive

encryptkey='key_value'
encryptkey='1234*#mykey'

Double quotation marks:

use alphanumeric, special, and DBCS characters
can be up to 64 bytes long
use uppercase and lowercase letters
can include blank spaces, but cannot contain all blanks
is case sensitive

encryptkey="key_value"
encryptkey="1234*#mykey"
%let mykey=Abcdefghi12;
encryptkey="&mykey"

When the ENCRYPTKEY= key value uses DBCS characters, the 64-byte limit applies to the character string after it has been transcoded to UTF-8 encoding. You can use the following DATA step to calculate the length in bytes of a key value in DBCS:

data _null_;
    key=length(unicodec('key-value','UTF8'));
    put 'key length=' key;
run;