[PYTHON-CRYPTO] Bryan calling Bryan (ECDSA).

[Michael Ströder]

Bryan Mongeau wrote:
>
> I couldn't help but notice Bryan Olson's astute observations about amkCrypto
> and M2Crypto being too tightly bound to SSL. I concur that ciphers ought to
> be abstracted from the SSL protocol, and made available independently. Some
> even suggested waiting for AES to be included in OpenSSL to make it available
> to python programmers.

OpenSSL is not only a implementation of SSL. It also provides C
implementations of widely used cipher algorithms. E.g. amkCrypto
makes these algorithm implementations available to Python programs.

> This is precisely what I was attempting to avoid by creating pyAES. OpenSSL
> has its applications and it executes them admirably. However, including such
> a large package merely to access a few crypto functions seems to me like an
> unnecessary bloat. Especially if it is to be bundled in a python distribution.

You're right that adding OpenSSL libs to every cryptographic
application might be a code bloat for small programs. (On the other
hand most Python 2.0 installations are today built and installed
with OpenSSL anyway.)

To get a solution acceptable in a wider range of applications I
would like to suggest the definition of a class API which completely
abstracts from the underlying implementations and where an
application can locate a cryptographic algorithm or protocol at
run-time (factory class design pattern?).

Ciao, Michael.