Buggywhip

Low cost GPS on a Mac

2011-07-06T20:41:00.000-07:00

I recently acquired a copy of Shai Vaingast's book, "Beginning Python Visualization" and his examples are based on GPS data. Not having a source of GPS data and not wanting to spend a lot of money, for $19 I bought a USB GPS dongle, a UniTraQ UD-731. Its package contained the GPS receiver, a short USB extension cable, and a miniCD with user-level Windows apps. Because I cannot easily read

Porting to Python3

2011-05-16T19:37:00.000-07:00

I put off converting my Python code to Python3 for the usual reasons, including lack of 3rd-party library support and perceived issues with Unicode. But not all my work are applications; a significant portion are crypto libraries. I should at least convert them to Python3 so I do not become part of the problem. When hashing data for digital signatures the data must always have a consistent

Python versions posted

2011-03-10T14:31:00.000-08:00

I have posted pure Python versions of Salsa20, ChaCha, BLAKE, and SHA-512 (which also supports SHA-384 and the new NIST algorithms SHA-512/256, and SHA-512/224). Update (May 9): added Blowfish Update (May 17): started a folder for Python3 conversions Update (May 30): added a Python wrapper for C version of BLAKE

Erase keys and credit card numbers in Python

2010-12-18T23:19:00.000-08:00

Not to start a long discussion on system security and the advisability of doing crypto in potentially compromised environments, suffice it to say it is still good practice to erase keys, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information when no longer needed. Overwriting the sensitive content with garbage will not prevent leakage but it can reduce the likelihood. Unfortunately Python's

Adam

2010-10-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

You may be aware, or perhaps not... I've been salivating for months now. In late November the wait will be over. Adam is an Android-based touchscreen tablet running the NVIDIA Tegra2 platform. ...with a 10" PixelQi screen (1024×600 and viewable in bright sunlight), 3G, Wifi 802.11n, GPS, 3Mpx camera, microSD card, etc, etc, and 16 hours of battery life (up to 160(?) hours with backlight off

A Stick Figure Guide to AES

2009-09-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

Jeff Moser wrote/tooned an excellent, gentle introduction to AES. http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html

Using Python ctypes to access C lib global data

2009-08-09T20:32:00.000-07:00

I want to access global data in a C library from within a Python program. The Python ctypes documentation tells you how to call functions, set up arguments and other things. But if you want to access global data, well, the doc is lacking a good example. This may help. (I'm assuming you are generally familiar with ctypes.)Suppose you have a C library with several functions and a single global

Jython classes callable from Java

2008-09-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

Folks keep asking so perhaps I should post this with wider distribution. It is a page, with examples, that talks about how to install Jython, call Java classes, make Jython classes callable from Java, and more. http://www.seanet.com/~bugbee/python/jython4.html

Salsa20/12

2008-05-26T00:02:00.000-07:00

I've been off the grid for the last couple of months, heads-down on a project. ...a fun and challenging project. Now that I've come up for air, I notice Salsa20/12 (Salsa20 with 12 rounds) has been selected one of the eSTREAM finalists. Congratulations to Daniel Bernstein. I conclude from my re-read of the final report and other materials that Salasa20/12 is indeed the preferred software

Make OpenSSL CA, SSL Server and Client Certs

2008-03-05T23:30:00.000-08:00

Even at this late date there is still confusion on how to get OpenSSL to generate a CA and SSL certificates. So, here is a script that I hope will answer some questions. ...there will undoubtedly be more. I also have an ECC version I will upload in a few days. It was written some time ago and needs to be reviewed. Update 3/6: Here is an ECC script. It points out a couple of likely bugs with

Chumby - first impressions

2008-01-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

I just adopted a Chumby. http://www.chumby.com/storyOpen the bag, plug it in, run the short built-in tutorial, go to the chumby web site to name and authenticate, select some widgets, and away you go. ...approx 15 minutes.Now playing... Poking around in the control panel, you can enable ssh and login. It is Linux, very familiar. It has

Python access to CryptMT, Dragon, HC, LEX, NLS, Rabbit (eSTREAM ciphers)

2007-11-04T15:50:00.000-08:00

The last couple of months have been heads down and very long hours with my day job. I'm back now to personal projects and put together another Python wrapper for these ciphers using the eSTREAM APIs. See http://www.seanet.com/~bugbee/crypto

SOAP and SSL using ZSI and SOAPpy

2007-08-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

I've been attempting to get web services (SOAP) to work using SSL with mutual authentication via X.509 certs. ...in a Python, M2Crypto and OpenSSL environment. The two most obvious choices are ZSI and SOAPpy. See Python Web Services.Short version: I'm disappointed.More testing is needed but I did get M2Crypto's SSL to do a full handshake complete with arbitration and mutual authentication.

Optional typing: best of both worlds?

2007-07-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

There continues to be an ongoing debate over which is better, static typing or dynamic typing. I argue there are advantages to both, but if I have to choose, I favor dynamic. I'll make no bones about it, I'm one of those that loves Python, personal productivity topping my list of reasons. Python is an excellent language for many/most uses, but I run into places where pure dynamic typing is

Want more?

2007-07-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, processor speeds in the form of clock rates have not increased much in the last few years, yet higher performance CPUs are being delivered. Moore's law is still in effect but increases in chip density are no longer being translated to increases in clock speed. Instead, we are seeing more CPUs on a chip. Unfortunately, most of today's software doesn't know of

Making Simple DLLs Simply

2007-07-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

I often want to compile some simple C code and have it accessible from Python, but making DLLs and Python extensions for Windows has always been, for me, problematic. (To keep this note brief and on a positive note, I'm going to focus on what worked, only suggesting a couple of problems I ran into. I can be more specific, but for now....)Python extensions compiled using Microsoft tools need

Papyros: platform independent parallel processing

2007-06-12T23:38:00.000-07:00

Papyros, written by George Sakkis, appears to be a fairly simple way to use surplus cycles on other machines. Written in Python, it is platform independent using a master-slave model. Remote communication is handled by Pyro. To parallelize your program, some code changes are necessary, but they appear to be minimal. Each slave platform needs to have a Python app running to receive the

Fast stream ciphers from eSTREAM

2007-06-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

Several years ago the EU (European Union), through a project called NESSIE, analyzed and recommended a number of cryptographic primitives. You can learn more about NESSIE from the links below. One category in which they were not satisfied and made no recommendation is stream ciphers, so they launched a new project, eSTREAM, expressly for the evaluation of stream ciphers. eSTREAM is now in

A Python ctypes wrapper for LibTomCrypt

2007-06-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

Recently I wrote a Python ctypes wrapper for LibTomCrypt. I'm making that code available, free for any use.pyTomCrypt v0.20 implements most of Tom's crypto library: - public key algorithms: RSA, DSA, ECDSA, ECDH - hash algorithms: md2, md4, md5, rmd128, rmd160, rmd256, rmd320, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512, tiger, whirlpool - symmetric ciphers: aes, rijndael,

For me, an experiment.

2007-06-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

I am not a blogger, or at least I don't think I am one, but I've noticed I have a few things to say. ...or at least there have been a few emails that could be considered of general interest. Rather than pushing email, I really should try a pull mechanism and give Blogging a go. If all this works and I indeed have something to say, I'll continue. So, what will you likely find here? Today