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FAQ.rst

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FAQ

Q: What is the one-time pad?

A: It's an inconvenient cipher which provides an information theoretic guarantee of confidentiality. Our goal is to design ciphers which achieve modern security notions, while minimizing inconveniences & still being able to make non-trivial statements, & information theoretic guarantees, against even computationally unbounded adversaries. In this effort, we've built what we hope to be a family of such candidate ciphers. Two concrete implementations being the Chunky2048 & Slick256 ciphers.

Q: How fast is this Chunky2048 cipher?

A: Well, because it relies on hashlib.shake_128 hashing to build key material streams, it's rather efficient. It can process about 40 MiB/s on a single ~1.5 GHz core for both encrypting & decrypting. This is still slow relative to other stream ciphers, but this package is written in pure Python & without hardware optimizations. Using SHA3 ASICs, specific chipset instructions, or a lower-level language implementation, could make this algorithm competitively fast.

Q: What size keys does the Chunky2048 cipher use?

A: It's been designed to work with any size of key >= 64 bytes.

Q: What's up with the AsyncDatabase / Database?

A: The idea is to create an intuitive, Pythonic interface to a transparently encrypted & decrypted key-value persistence tool that also cryptographically obscures metadata. They natively support raw bytes & JSON serializable data. They're also very well suited for async, concurrent, & distributed use-cases, since they organize collections of independent files for all of their data & administrative subdivisions. They're still works in progress, albeit very nifty ones.

Q: Why are the modules transformed into FrozenNamespace objects?

A: We overwrite our modules in this package to have a more fine-grained control over what part of the package's internal state is exposed to users & applications. The goal is make it more difficult for users to inadvertently jeopardize their security tools, & minimize the attack surface available to adversaries. The FrozenNamespace class also makes it easier to coordinate & decide the library's UI/UX across the package.

Known Issues

  • This package is currently in beta testing & active development, meaning major changes are still possible when there are really good reasons to do so. Contributions are welcome. Send us a message if you spot a bug or file a security issue report: