simple-crypt 0.1.9

Simple encryption and decryption for Python 3

What Does Simple Crypt Do?

Simple Crypt encrypts and decrypts data. It has two functions, encrypt and decrypt:

from simplecrypt import encrypt, decrypt
ciphertext = encrypt('password', plaintext)
plaintext = decrypt('password', ciphertext)

That’s it. You can see the implementation on github.

Why Should I Use Simple Crypt?

• It uses standard, well-known algorithms, closely following the recommendations here.

• It uses routines from the established pycrypto library (the cipher used is AES256).

• It includes a check (an HMAC with SHA256) to warn when ciphertext data are modified.

• It tries to make things as secure as possible when poor quality passwords are used (PBKDF2 with SHA256, a 128 bit salt, and 10,000 rounds). But that doesn’t mean you should use a poor password!

• Using a library, rather than writing your own code, means that we have less solutions to the same problem. That means more chance of finding bugs, which means more reliable, more secure code.

• If simple-crypt does have a bug, the use of a header in the ciphertext data means that you will be able to deploy a fixed version that still handles older data. So you can safely update without breaking existing users.

What Else Should I Know?

• You must also install pycrypto.

• The outputs from encrypt and decrypt are bytes. If you started with string input then you can convert the output from decrypt using .decode('utf8').

mystring = decrypt('password', ciphertext).decode('utf8')