>> No doubt this is a useful functionality to have but it would be great to >> have some comments on whether >> this can be(or even should be) feasibly added as an inbuilt support. > > MvL already asked for a patch so I suppose that means he thinks it's > useful.
I am actual skeptical that it is implementable in a reasonable way; if implemented, I'd say: why not? > Personally I've never encountered an encrypted zipfile, so I > just have questions: is there a standard encryption algorithm? In principle, yes. There are several aspects of encryption described in http://www.pkware.com/documents/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT There are several encryption algorithms defined, such as "traditional PKWARE", DES, 3DES, "original RC2", RC4, AES, "corrected RC2", "corrected RC2-64", blowfish, twofish. In the file header general purpose bits , bit 0 indicates "file is encrypted" (which means "traditional PKWARE"), bit 6 indicates "strong encryption" (an additional header then giving details). > What is encrypted? The entire file or individual members? Traditionally, only individual files. With strong encryption (only?), the central directory can also be encrypted. > How are you supposed to give the password? In pkzip: interactively. In the import support: this remains to be seen in the patch. I assume people requesting that feature have a plan. > Also, I suppose there could be (US) export > problems with the code, so it would have to be optional (and we might > not be able to build it into binaries we distribute from python.org). The zipfile module already supports decryption. I forgot whether we determined that support for decryption only doesn't fall under the export restrictions, or whether we reported the module to the BXA as well. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
