Byte operations (XOR) in python

Question

    #!/usr/bin/env python3

import binascii


var=binascii.a2b_qp("hello")
key=binascii.a2b_qp("supersecretkey")[:len(var)]

print(binascii.b2a_qp(var))
print(binascii.b2a_qp(key))


#here i want to do an XOR operation on the bytes in var and key and place them in 'encryption': encryption=var XOR key

print(binascii.b2a_qp(encrypted))

If someone could enlighten me on how I could do this, I would be very happy. Very new to all data type conversions, so yes ... reading through the python wiki is not as clear as we would like: (.

Answer 1

It looks like you need to XOR each of the characters in the message with the corresponding character in the key. However, for this you need a bit of interconversion with ordand chr, because you can only use xor numbers, not strings:

>>> encrypted = [ chr(ord(a) ^ ord(b)) for (a,b) in zip(var, key) ] 
>>> encrypted
['\x1b', '\x10', '\x1c', '\t', '\x1d']

>>> decrypted = [ chr(ord(a) ^ ord(b)) for (a,b) in zip(encrypted, key) ]
>>> decrypted
['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']

>>> "".join(decrypted)
'hello'

, binascii.a2b_qp("hello") (, ).

, , . , , , itertools.cycle:

>>> from itertools import cycle
>>> var="hello"
>>> key="xy"

>>> encrypted = [ chr(ord(a) ^ ord(b)) for (a,b) in zip(var, cycle(key)) ]
>>> encrypted
['\x10', '\x1c', '\x14', '\x15', '\x17']

>>> decrypted = [ chr(ord(a) ^ ord(b)) for (a,b) in zip(encrypted, cycle(key)) ]
>>> "".join(decrypted)
'hello'

unicode/multi-byte ( ), ( ) , , XOR, - :

>>> var=u"hello\u2764"
>>> var
'hello❤'

>>> encrypted = [ a ^ b for (a,b) in zip(bytes(var, 'utf-8'),cycle(bytes(key, 'utf-8'))) ]
>>> encrypted
[27, 16, 28, 9, 29, 145, 248, 199]

>>> decrypted = [ a ^ b for (a,b) in zip(bytes(encrypted), cycle(bytes(key, 'utf-8'))) ]
>>> decrypted
[104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 226, 157, 164]

>>> bytes(decrypted)
b'hello\xe2\x9d\xa4'

>>> bytes(decrypted).decode()
'hello❤'

Answer 2

python3

zip:

def encrypt1(var, key):
    return bytes(a ^ b for a, b in zip(var, key))

int.from_bytes int.to_bytes:

def encrypt2(var, key):
    key = key[:len(var)]
    int_var = int.from_bytes(var, sys.byteorder)
    int_key = int.from_bytes(key, sys.byteorder)
    int_enc = int_var ^ int_key
    return int_enc.to_bytes(len(var), sys.byteorder)

:

assert encrypt1(b'hello', b'supersecretkey') == b'\x1b\x10\x1c\t\x1d'
assert encrypt2(b'hello', b'supersecretkey') == b'\x1b\x10\x1c\t\x1d'

var key 1000 :

$ python3 -m timeit \
  -s "import test_xor;a=b'abcdefghij'*100;b=b'0123456789'*100" \
  "test_xor.encrypt1(a, b)"
10000 loops, best of 3: 100 usec per loop

$ python3 -m timeit \
  -s "import test_xor;a=b'abcdefghij'*100;b=b'0123456789'*100" \
  "test_xor.encrypt2(a, b)"
100000 loops, best of 3: 5.1 usec per loop

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