[PYTHON-CRYPTO] confused about state of crypto in python

[Michael Ströder]

"Jason R. Mastaler" wrote:
> 
> In fact, I'm not even sure if I'm asking this in the right place.  The
> archives for this mailing list only show three articles for this
> month, and the pycrypto-* lists at sourceforge are even emptier.

The good news: This is exactly the right place to discuss it.

The bad news: Although I started working on a proposal for a generic
API (see old posting below) I got stuck in other work since then.

Ciao, Michael.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PYTHON-CRYPTO] PyCrypto Draft: Proposal 2001-02-18
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 18:57:48 +0100
From: Michael Ströder <michael at STROEDER.COM>
Reply-To: Michael Ströder <michael at STROEDER.COM>
Organization: stroeder.com
To: PYTHON-CRYPTO at NIC.SURFNET.NL

HI!

I started to design the module layout, wrote some base classes for
hashs and the loader mechanism for my PyCrypto proposal. I did not
get as far as I wanted (yeah, social and commercial life... ;-) but
it's a start.

Please have a look at this small archive:


http://www.stroeder.com/python/PyCrypto/PyCrypto-proposal-2001-02-18.tar.gz

I will try to continously improve the documentation found on:

 http://www.stroeder.com/python/PyCrypto/proposal.html

I would like to follow this short-time roadmap:

1. Discuss open issues of loader mechanism and module layout:
 - Which key type for registry dictionary?
   OIDs? Which representation of OIDs? String vs. tuple.
 - Should we maintain the alias registry? How? dumpasn1.cfg?
 - Passing arguments in factory function
PyCrypto.registry.getInstance()
   to __init__() methods of implementation classes.
 - Performance? (mainly startup latency)
 - Implementors here should think about how to tie their modules to
   this loader.
 - Implementation registration unambigous and thread-safe?
 - Documentation of this part.

2. Discuss class API of algorithm implementations:
 - Hashes are easy and almost complete (see sources for examples).
 - Please provide some wrapper class examples for e.g. M2Crypto.
 - Collect as many requirements for cipher class API as possible
   + key formats
   + modes
   + etc.

Ciao, Michael.