ANN: obfuscate

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:03:47 +0100, Christian Heimes wrote:

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

As the author of obfuscate, I would like to second Christian's statement. 
obfuscate is NOT meant for serious security, as I state in both the 
source code and the documentation to the module.

That's not to say that it can't be useful for some people -- I wouldn't 
have spent the time writing it if I didn't think it was useful. But it is 
useful for obfuscation, education and puzzles, not for secure encryption.

I'm not sure how serious the calls for this to be added to the standard 
library are. If they're serious, I'm grateful for the votes of confidence 
from people, but I can't imagine Guido saying yes. In any case, it's 
premature to talk about adding it to the std library while it is still in 
alpha.

Thank you for all the comments, even the tongue-in-cheek ones. This has 
exceeded my wildest expectations! I'm always interested in feedback, good 
and bad, either publicly or privately.



-- 
Steven