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Re: string encryption

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On 28/04/2021 23:33, Malcolm McLean wrote:
> On Wednesday, 28 April 2021 at 20:55:38 UTC+1, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>> On 2021-04-28 16:27, Malcolm McLean wrote: 
>>> What's the best method for cheap and cheerful string encryption, which takes a plaintext string and a short string as a key, and returns a crypted string? The encrypted text must be a string, so the encryption must never create a nul character. It might also be best not to create ascii control characters, or non-ascii characters.
>> Looks like a symmetric encryption to me. Any method would do. E.g. 
>> ChaCha20 cipher. Hash the key to initialize. There are plenty 
>> implementations of. It is cryptographically strong, computationally 
>> fast, needs no padding. 
>>
> CHaCha20. Hadn't heard of that. That's the sort of idea I'm looking for. 
>> If you do not care much about strength, simply use a random generator. 
>> Hash the key, use it as the seed. xor generated octets to the 
>> characters. Done. 
>>
> I'm not overly concerned about strength. If we come under attack from a resourceful
> cracker we'll have more things to worry about than these configuration files I'd rather
> protect from manipulation.

Are you trying to protect against /manipulation/, or against /reading/
the configuration files?

If it is just manipulation that is concern, have the file as something like:

# Generated configuration file - do not edit!
[foo]
bar = 123
# Configuration file checksum 0123456789abcdef

The final line is the checksum (md5, sha256, whatever) of all the rest
of the file concatenated with a "secret" keystring.

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string encryption Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> - 2021-04-28 07:27 -0700
  Re: string encryption Kristjan Robam <he12457@hotmail.com> - 2021-04-28 08:39 -0700
  Re: string encryption David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2021-04-28 19:58 +0200
    Re: string encryption David Spencer <spencer@panix.com> - 2021-04-28 18:00 +0000
      Re: string encryption David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2021-04-28 20:47 +0200
      Re: string encryption Kristjan Robam <rob999999999@yahoo.com> - 2021-04-29 02:26 -0700
    Re: string encryption Kristjan Robam <ya12983@mail.com> - 2021-04-28 12:14 -0700
    Re: string encryption Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> - 2021-04-28 14:33 -0700
    Re: string encryption Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> - 2021-04-28 14:39 -0700
  Re: string encryption "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2021-04-28 21:55 +0200
    Re: string encryption Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> - 2021-04-28 14:33 -0700
      Re: string encryption "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2021-04-29 08:06 +0200
        Re: string encryption David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2021-04-29 09:38 +0200
          Re: string encryption "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2021-04-29 10:00 +0200
          Re: string encryption Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2021-04-29 22:33 +0100
      Re: string encryption David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2021-04-29 09:37 +0200
        Re: string encryption Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> - 2021-04-29 06:40 -0700
          Re: string encryption David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2021-04-29 17:01 +0200

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