lightweight encryption of text file

Daniel Fetchinson fetchinson at googlemail.com
Fri Jan 8 16:39:39 EST 2010


>> I have a plain text file which I would like to protect in a very
>> simple minded, yet for my purposes sufficient, way. I'd like to
>> encrypt/convert it into a binary file in such a way that possession of
>> a password allows anyone to convert it back into the original text
>> file while not possessing the password one would only see the
>> following with the standard linux utility 'file':
>>
>> [fetchinson at fetch ~]$ file encrypted.data
>> encrypted.data: data
>>
>> and the effort required to convert the file back to the original text
>> file without the password would be equivalent to guessing the
>> password.
>>
>> I'm fully aware of the security implications of this loose
>> specification, but for my purposes this would be a good solution.
>>
>> What would be the simplest way to achieve this using preferably stock
>> python without 3rd party modules? If a not too complex 3rd party
>> module made it really simple that would be acceptable too.
>
> Paul Rubin's p3.py algorithm is probably the most straightforward way to
> meet
> these requirements. It's not a standard crypto algorithm by any means, but
> Paul
> knows his stuff and has devised it with these deployment restrictions in
> mind.
>
>    http://www.nightsong.com/phr/crypto/p3.py

Thanks a lot, currently I'm having trouble using this code on python
2.6 but probably some small tweaking will fix it.

Cheers,
Daniel


-- 
Psss, psss, put it down! - http://www.cafepress.com/putitdown



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