[PYTHON-CRYPTO] Near-term projects for pycrypto

[Bram Cohen]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Andrew Kuchling wrote:

> 2) Is there any point in keeping the implementations of MD5 and SHA if
> Python comes with them?

I say nuke 'em

> 4) Remove the export/not-for-export cruft.

Yes!

> 6) Discard some of the more obscure algorithms (HAVAL, Diamond,
> Skipjack, maybe CAST, RC5 and IDEA, too)

Yes! Those are nothing but temptation to naive would-be protocol
designers.

> and add AES

Most definitely, not having AES would be just plain embarassing.

> 7) Public-key stuff: should it remain in this package, or should it be
> scrapped and the scope restricted to hashing and block encryption?
> Public-key is much harder to define and implement, so I think
> splitting it out into a separate distribution is the right thing to
> do.

With the built-in pow() function most public-key things are just a few
lines, and given the difficulty of making APIs match up exactly with what
people will want later I'd say it's best to let people do the few lines of
code themselves. Exceptions include random prime generation, gcf and maybe
dsa (since dsa's API is fairly clear.) I'm probably missing a few others.

In any case, I agree that public key is a fairly separate set of issues,
and am in favor of it being separated out.

-Bram Cohen

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
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