cryptographer.py is a python program I wrote to learn more about encryption and python. It is designed to encrypt messages using a two phase encryption technique I created. These messages can be entered either as part of the command or from a specified file. The message is encrypted with password which is hashed at runtime to ensure complexity and length without making it hard to remember. The password is used as part of the encryption and to determine the number of rounds in the encryption. Once the file has been encrypted it can either be printed to standard out or written to a file. Encrypted text will consist of a huge variety of Unicode characters, not all of which will be displayed properly with most fonts.

Decryption works the same way but in reverse.

See accompanying LICENSE file for the full license.

One tenth of a bitcoin will be paid out to whom so ever can responsibly disclose a method by which the bounty.encrypt can be decrypted without knowledge of the password or key length and within a reasonable time frame on a modern computer (or cluster of computers).

Along with the NO WARRENTY disclaimer explictly laided out in the GPL, this software has not been independantly reviewed and should NOT be used for any application for which strong encryption is required.

No installation is required to run cryptographer.py. Simply give the file execute privileges and run it. If you do not place the cryptographer.py file inside your path you will need to specify its relative or absolute path.

cryptographer.py (-e | -d) -p PASSWORD -k NUMBER (-m MESSAGE | -i INPUT_FILENAME) [-o OUTPUT_FILENAME] [-v | -vv]

cryptographer.py -e -p password -k 20 -m “This is a message.”

cryptographer.py -e -p “secret code words” -k 15 -i secret_file.txt

cryptographer.py -e -p “secret code words” -k 15 -i secret_file.txt -o encrypted_file.txt

cryptographer.py -e -p “secret code words” -k 15 -i secret_file.txt -o encrypted_file.txt -vv

cryptographer.py -d -p “secret code words” -k 15 -i encrypted_file.txt -o decrypted_file.txt

The hashing function does not make passwords harder to guess, it simply makes sure that there are enough rounds of encryption and that the characters used in the encryption have a wide enough variety. Please try to use long pass phases which someone who knows you is unlikely to guess.

The key length field can be any number higher than zero. However, it is suggested that you not pick a very low number (1-10) or a very high number (500+). Very low numbers will reduce the effectiveness of the encryption and very high numbers will make the encryption take a very long time without adding a whole lot of security.

The key length is part of the secret key used to decrypt a message. You MUST be able to remember this in order to decrypt the message. However, making it something guessable (birthday, number of cats, age of child, etc) is unadvised. Use something that is unlikely to be guessed by easy to remember.

Verbose output should NOT be saved to a file as it contains sensitive information which will make it trivial to decrypt the message. Use the verbose mode only for testing purposes and use the -o argument to save encrypt/decrypt messages to a file.