[PATCH] Add xorpipe utility

Michael Conrad mconrad at intellitree.com
Thu Sep 13 09:26:01 UTC 2012


On 9/12/2012 10:42 PM, jody at jodybruchon.com wrote:
> My rationale behind writing this simple utility is as follows: Moving data
> through a fully encrypted tunnel like SSH is too slow for me, so I use
> netcat/socat for moving large chunks of data between systems. I don't want the
> data to be easily identified and reproduced if it is somehow intercepted, though
> it's also not a major problem if someone goes through the trouble of decrypting
> it; thus, simple XOR encryption is good enough for my purposes and is also
> extremely fast. I'm sure someone else will find it useful, and given its
> minuscule size, it is of negligible cost to include.

I apologize for further sidetracking the conversation, but if I were 
going to write a quick-n-dirty encryption tool I would pick a 32-bit int 
and then XOR with a pseudo-random sequence generated from it. That would 
at least give the attacker a mental challenge (unless they knew the 
first 4 bytes of the data...)  Maybe also add a salt parameter?

   while (more_data) {
     data[i]= data[i] ^ key ^ salt;
     key= key * a + c;
   }
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator)

Integer multiplication is pretty cheap on most hardware.

-Mike


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