Carl Banks wrote: > On Jan 8, 11:14 am, Daniel Fetchinson <fetchin...@googlemail.com> > wrote: >> I have a plain text file which I would like to protect in a very >> simple minded, yet for my purposes sufficient, way. I'd like to >> encrypt/convert it into a binary file in such a way that possession of >> a password allows anyone to convert it back into the original text >> file while not possessing the password one would only see the >> following with the standard linux utility 'file': >> >> [fetchin...@fetch ~]$ file encrypted.data >> encrypted.data: data >> >> and the effort required to convert the file back to the original text >> file without the password would be equivalent to guessing the >> password. > > > gpg -c simpletextfile.txt -o simpletextfile.gpg > > But I guess you can't depend on users to have gpg installed so you > have to roll out some unvetted Python tool. > > The OP's statement of requirements would be pretty much satisfied by the "crypt" utility. He can even run it under Cygwin on Windows if necessary. Cryptographic sophistication (or even cryptographic security) was not requested (and would not be provided anyway by most of the suggested solutions).
If any real protection is required then an ad-hoc program is definitely not the way to provide it. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 PyCon is coming! Atlanta, Feb 2010 http://us.pycon.org/ Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ UPCOMING EVENTS: http://holdenweb.eventbrite.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
