Pure Python Data Mangling or Encrypting

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 4:51 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Jun 2015 04:22 am, Randall Smith wrote:
>
>> The owner (client software) encrypts the data using AES.  This is the
>> default behavior of the client software.  If the client chooses to
>> disable encryption, that's their issue for sure.
>
> I cannot imagine what you think you gain from allowing that to be optional.
> Apart from privacy and security breaches.

I've no idea whether this is the case or not, but one thing you might
gain is independence from a third-party module. You could, for
instance, automatically AES-encrypt your data, but only if "from
Crypto.Cipher import AES" didn't raise ImportError. That effectively
makes encryption optional (the program won't barf for lack of pycrypto
installation), while still clearly being the default - and if you have
a nice loud warning, then it's clear that encryption is the normal
state, and the fallback is a lesser state.

ChrisA