rotor alternative?

[Peter Hansen]

"John J. Lee" wrote:
> 
> "Dave Brueck" <dave at pythonapocrypha.com> writes:
> 
> > Robin wrote:
> > > It seems that the rotor module is being deprecated in 2.3, but there
> > > doesn't seem to be an obvious alternative. I'm using it just for
> [...Dave has switched to AES]
> > Since I'm not going to great lengths to hide the key, it works out to be about
> > the same strength of encryption as rotor. ;-)
> 
> Quite.  I don't understand why it's deprecated.  We've known since the
> fifties that the algorithm is broken, so wasn't it clear from the
> start that this was for obfuscation, not strong encryption?  Shouldn't
> we just add a warning to the docs (if there's not one there already)??

If it's really for obfuscation, wouldn't a simpler algorithm be
sufficient, such as "XOR each byte with 0x5A" or something like that?

If the answer is "no, that's too easy to break", then it's not really 
just for obfuscation, is it?

-Peter