Encryption and hashing

[Kless]

Since that I'm working to let encrypt/hash data in the data base of my
projects I have been looking for libraries and/or wrappers. So I want
give my feedback about it.

In the first I found PyCrypto [1] but I see any problems:

* I think that isn't been maintained because the last modification of
its web was on 30 Sep 2006
* Since that has not been uploaded to SourceForge [2] we cann't know
when was released the last version
* There algorithms more secure and modern that it hasn't.

Then, I found 2 great C libraries that are being maintained and
updated with many algorithms. They're MCrypt [3] and MHash [4], and
both have released the last version on this year.

For who knows any of criptography I comment that you can use
algorithms as secure as Rijndael, Twofish, or Serpent with the CFB
cipher mode. And for hash you can use RIPEMD, SHA-2 or WHIRLPOOL.

And the best is that there are wrappers for Python [5] [6].
For if anybody is interested on playing with them:

In the first you need the headers. In Debian/Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-cache install libmcrypt-dev libmhash-dev

$ wget http://labix.org/download/python-mcrypt/python-mcrypt-1.1.tar.gz
$ wget http://labix.org/download/python-mhash/python-mhash-1.4.tar.gz
$ tar xzf python-mcrypt*.tar.gz; tar xzf python-mhash*.tar.gz
$ cd python-mhash*; sudo python setup.py install; cd ..
$ cd python-mcrypt*; sudo python setup.py install; cd..


[1] http://www.amk.ca/python/code/crypto
[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/pycrypto
[3] http://mcrypt.sourceforge.net/
[4] http://mhash.sourceforge.net/
[5] http://labix.org/python-mcrypt
[6] http://labix.org/python-mhash