Does rotor follow a cross-language encryption algorithm ?

[Martin von Loewis]

shriek at gmx.co.uk (Stephen) writes:

> Makes me wonder why more people don't use the rotor when they need
> "just enough" encryption without going the full hog with PKI.

I believe the algorithm used is cryptographically weak. As the
comments suggest, the algorithm is the one used by the German Enigma
machine from WWII. For those, a team lead by Alan Turing eventually
implemented computing hardware that would break the new codes every
day.

> Just to clear up my own understanding, is it fair to say that 
> a "built-in" module can be defined as one that is included in
> the core Python distributed, and is written in C as oppopsed 
> to Python, but which still needs to be imported before use ?

Almost correct. There is a slight overloading of names
here. Traditionally "builtin" modules are the ones listed in
sys.builtin_module_names, which in turn are the ones statically linked
with the compiler. These days, most installations build the modules
shipped with Python as shared libraries, so they are strictly speaking
"extension modules". However, to distinguish them from third-party
extension modules, they are often called "builtin" even if not linked
with the interpreter.

Regards,
Martin