rotor alternative?

[John J. Lee]

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:

> "Dave Brueck" <dave at pythonapocrypha.com> writes:
[...]
> > How's this: it would be really great to have a key-based data
> > obfuscator (read: weak encryptor) ship as a standard part of
> > Python. 
> 
> But that's precisely what rotor is, and IMO it does a bad job.

That's not a "but", that's an "and".  It does a bad job of strong
encryption, it does the job for obfuscation.  It *is* a step up
Anybody can write a program to decrypt XORed data in a line of code
(maybe emacs has a keystroke for it), decryption of rotor encryption
requires the extra effort to find a library to crack it, or to know
enough to write your own.  Whether that small point justified its
initial inclusion is certainly debatable, but now it's in there, it
seems like a mistake to deprecate it.


John