Rotor in Jython?

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On 27 Feb 2002, Paul Rubin wrote:

> "Scherer, Bill" <Bill.Scherer at VerizonWireless.com> writes:
> > I've a need to perform rotor decryption in Jython.  A quick
> > search didn't reveal anything to help.  I've begun coding it in
> > Python from rotormodule.c. My C knowledge is not strong, so there
> > are spots that are surely not right.
>
> I hope you're not the rotor module for computer security.  That cipher
> is nowhere near as safe to use as a modern one like AES.

Actually, that's not necessarily true. AES and friends are
cryptographically much stronger than rotors for key lengths of a given
size, but with rotors the computational cost of encryption/decryption is
unaffected by key length, so if you have a good source of nearly random
bits to use in making long keys then you can use rotors for encryption
that is, for all intents and purposes, unbreakable.

Put another way: sorting by key length, AES beats rotors hands down.
Sorting by computational cost, rotors always win because you can just make
the keys longer (without having to reimplement your crypto).

-Dave