The cipher and/or key differs from the established cipher and key.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

You have encrypted ESXi hosts and have had a failure that has generated a core file, but you are unable to decrypt the core with the error message "The cipher and/or key differs from the established cipher and key."

Environment

ESXi host with encryption.

Cause

The core file generated was incomplete or otherwise damaged before encryption. 

It would be an extremely rare circumstance that a host loses a cached encryption key. 

Resolution

To validate this attempt manual generation of another core file and once complete validate the core file is encrypted and then attempt to decrypt it. 

Here are example commands to generate a hostd zdump, validate the dump is encrypted, and then attempt to decrypt. 

vmbacktrace -n hostd -c -w

crypto-util envelope describe --offset 4096 /var/core/hostd-zdump.1

crypto-util envelope extract --offset 4096 /var/core/hostd-zdump.1 /var/core/unenc-hostd-zdump.1

Additional Information

Encrypted Core Dump Following ESXi Host PSOD – Explanation and Resolution