[PYTHON-CRYPTO] Near-term projects for pycrypto

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Paul Rubin wrote:
>
> 3) Supporting the OpenSSL stuff is IMO only worthwhile if the intention
> is to support actual SSL.

OpenSSL has very good low-level cipher implementations which
are already supported in amkCrypto/mxCrypto.

> 4) I don't see any point in supporting RC5 for interoperability since
> I don't know of any important applications that use it.  IDEA is used
> in legacy PGP versions but is only worth supporting in Pycrypt if
> someone is going to write a Python version of PGP.  Otherwise, drop
> IDEA.

-1. RC5 can be used in SSL/TLS, IDEA is common in commercial
crypto implementations (hardware and software).

> 5) I do see some point to supporting a generic fast 64-bit block
> cipher like CAST or Blowfish, since some apps want 64-bit ciphers, and
> 3DES is slow.
>
> 6) The above is from the philosophical standpoint that Pycrypt is
> mainly supposed to give app writers a way to put crypto into their
> applications without being crypto experts.  The alternate view it's
> more intended as a toolkit for experts.  Either view is ok with me,
> but the designers should make a clear decision about what the goals
> are, rather than muddling around between various possible goals.

IMHO, we should focus on designing interfaces and only think
about the possible driver implementation later on (most of
these are already available and only need to be adapted to
the interfaces).

--
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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