ANN: obfuscate

[Christian Heimes]

Stef Mientki wrote:
> sorry I don't,
> unless Python is only meant for the very well educated people in encryption.

All algorithms in obfuscate are obsolete, insecure and only interesting
for people *that* want to get well educated in the history of encryption.

> I neither did look at the code,
> but as a beginner with just 3 years of experience in Python,
> I've tried several scrambling libs, for a quick and dirty use.
> All were much too difficult, so I made my own xor-something.
> Coming from Delphi, a scrambling lib is working is less than 10 minutes, 
> without the need of any knowledge of encryption.
> I prefer Python over Delphi, but some things are made very complex in 
> Python.

It's tricky to implement modern cryptographic algorithms with Python.
Most example codes are written in C and the implementations are using
overflow (e.g. 255 + 1 == 0) a lot. It took me twice as long to get the
TEA family (TEA, XTEA, XXTEA) crypt functions right in Python than I
required to wrap existing code in an handwritten C interface.

One of the strongest encryption algorithm in the list -- Vigenère -- was
crack over 150 years (!) ago. A much, much stronger version of the
principles behind Vigenère was used in the German Enigma machine.
Because the algorithm was still not good enought some clever guy called
Turing and his team was able to crack the enigma. It's one of the main
reasons the Germans were defeated and the world doesn't look like in
Robert Harris "Fatherland" today. Oh, and we go computers, too. ;)

Grab pycrypto, m2crypto or one of the other packages if you need a
minimum amount of security.

Christian