block ciphers

[Paul Rubin]

Trevor Perrin <trevp_spam at trevp.net> writes:
> Q: How about adding block ciphers to Python 2.4?
> 
> PEP 272 defines an API, and there's an excellent library that
> implements it [1].  It would be very little work to copy the AES and
> DES3 modules into stdlib (perhaps in a 'ciphers' package).

PEP 272 has an API for both block and stream ciphers, and the block
cipher API is kind of cumbersome.  I did some work a while back on
defining a new block cipher API and posted some about it back then.
I've been meaning to get that code out of mothballs and propose a new
PEP.  A sample implementation is at 

  http://www.nightsong.com/phr/crypto/blockcipher.tgz

but there are some things about it that I want to change.  I recently
used it to write a pure-Python script that decrypts PGP files, if
that's of any interest too.

> So is this totally out of the question?  Or would it be worth
> pursuing, through a PEP, or patch, or discussion on python-dev?

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking.