AES and Credit card number encryption

[Tobiah]

I browsed this subject and thought I might use the
'AES' cypher scheme to do this. Would this be
a good choice?

I came across a "Python Cryptography Toolkit"

http://www.amk.ca/python/code/crypto

which has a nice AES implementation, but in
the example, a simple string is passed as the
key:

obj=AES.new('ab cdefgh', AES.ECB)

So my real question is, how do I go about
generating the best key. Isn't the length
supposed to be a 2^n bits, and soforth?

Thanks,

Tobiah

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[Paul Rubin]

Re: AES and Credit card number encryption

Tobiah <toby@tobiah.or gwrites:

I browsed this subject and thought I might use the 'AES' cypher
scheme to do this. Would this be a good choice?

There's more to it than that, but yes, AES is a good underlying
algorithm.

So my real question is, how do I go about generating the best key.
Isn't the length supposed to be a 2^n bits, and soforth?

AES key length is your choice of 128, 192, or 256 bits. In practice
128 bits (16 bytes) is fine and is what most people use. You should
use 16 completely random bytes. Get these by reading them from
os.urandom(16), which is provided for basically this purpose.

[Tobiah]

Re: AES and Credit card number encryption

Paul Rubin wrote:

Tobiah <toby@tobiah.or gwrites:

>I browsed this subject and thought I might use the 'AES' cypher
>scheme to do this. Would this be a good choice?

>
There's more to it than that, but yes, AES is a good underlying
algorithm.

Looking at the problem further, I am getting the idea that
PGP, or GPG (Asymetric encryption) would be better, because
then all of the software that has to *write* CC numbers, would
not have to access the 'secret' key. You see we have to write
the number often, but almost always only have to access (read)
a masked number (4232********34 35).

PGP sounds great, but it seems like a huge subject to cover
in a day or two. Is there a nice module for python that would
let me do the most usual operations easily? I just want to make
a key, hide it, and the use the public key to encrypt all future
and past credit card numbers.

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[Paul Rubin]

Re: AES and Credit card number encryption

Tobiah <toby@tobiah.or gwrites:

Looking at the problem further, I am getting the idea that
PGP, or GPG (Asymetric encryption) would be better, because
then all of the software that has to *write* CC numbers, would
not have to access the 'secret' key.

Yes.

PGP sounds great, but it seems like a huge subject to cover
in a day or two. Is there a nice module for python that would
let me do the most usual operations easily? I just want to make
a key, hide it, and the use the public key to encrypt all future
and past credit card numbers.

I think I did hear of a GPG module. You can also call GPG as an
external library. There are also modules around that do public-key
operations directly, or some like M2Crypto that use OpenSSL for public
key operations.

I wrote something a while back for applications pretty similar to
yours, but never released it. I should clean it up sometime. At the
moment I wouldn't consider it well-tested enough for deployment in
real applications, and also it currently doesn't support AES because
it was written to avoid using C extensions, so it used a nonstandard
pure-Python cipher.

http://www.nightsong.com/phr/crypto/crypto.txt

If you want to just encrypt stuff in pure Python and you don't mind
using a nonstandard (but reasonably secure, at least compared with the
old rotor module it was written to replace), it's here:

http://www.nightsong.com/phr/crypto/p3.py

Note that you get a ciphertext considerably longer than the plaintext.
This is unavoidable for various security reasons and a proper AES
setup (or a call to GPG) will be the same way.