Obfuscate Strings in Python

Obfuscate strings in Python

If you just want to prevent casually glancing at a password, you may want to consider encoding/decoding the password to/from base64. It's not secure in the least, but the password won't be casually human/robot readable.

import base64
# Encode password (must be bytes type)
encoded_pw = base64.b64encode(raw_pw)

# Decode password (must be bytes type)
decoded_pw = base64.b64decode(encoded_pw)

Obfuscating a string that can afterwards be used in a web address

I ended up solving the issue with itsdangerous, which is a dependency of Flask so I have it on my server anyway.

As the example here shows:

>>> from itsdangerous import URLSafeSerializer
>>> s = URLSafeSerializer('secret-key')
>>> s.dumps([1, 2, 3, 4])
'WzEsMiwzLDRd.wSPHqC0gR7VUqivlSukJ0IeTDgo'
>>> s.loads('WzEsMiwzLDRd.wSPHqC0gR7VUqivlSukJ0IeTDgo')
[1, 2, 3, 4]

It's safe to assume I won't have any surprises as the docstring says:

Works like :class:Serializer but dumps and loads into a URL safe string consisting of the upper and lowercase character of the alphabet as well as _, - and ..

Obfuscating a string to be saved in a text file

def myencode_str(ori_str, key):
    enc = []
    for i in range(len(ori_str)):
        key_c = key[i % len(key)]
        enc_c = (ord(ori_str[i]) + ord(key_c)) % 256
        enc.append(enc_c)
    return (base64.urlsafe_b64encode(bytes(enc))).decode("utf-8") 

or see here for a full example:

from cryptography.fernet import Fernet

class Encrypt(object):
    '''
    see https://cryptography.io/en/latest/fernet/
    '''

    @classmethod
    def encrypt(cls, plain_text):
        '''
        @param enctypted_text: str or bytes
        @return cipher_text: str (.decode() converts the byte string to string)
        '''
        if isinstance(plain_text, str):
            plain_text = plain_text.encode()
        elif not isinstance(plain_text, bytes):
            raise ValueError('Value must be string or bytes')
        cipher_suite = Fernet(config.KEY.encode())
        cipher_text = cipher_suite.encrypt(plain_text).decode()
        return cipher_text

    @classmethod
    def decrypt(cls, enctypted_text):
        '''
        @param enctypted_text: str or bytes
        @return plain_text: str (.decode() converts the byte string to string)
        '''
        if isinstance(enctypted_text, str):
            enctypted_text = enctypted_text.encode()
        elif not isinstance(enctypted_text, bytes):
            raise ValueError('Value must be string or bytes')
        cipher_suite = Fernet(config.KEY.encode())
        plain_text = cipher_suite.decrypt(enctypted_text).decode()
        return plain_text

    @classmethod
    def generateKey(cls):
        key = Fernet.generate_key()
        return key*

obfuscating filenames in python

I ended up doing this for the time being to get around the windows issue, is just turning the filenames to hex so they don't mean anything. Not a great way to secure them, and probably even worse than the cesar cipher, but at least it works. Still looking for a better option to hide the filenames if someone has one.

Obsfuscate:

    def obs_filename(fname):
    string = fname.encode('utf-8').hex()
    return string

Deobfuscate:

    def deobs_filename(fname):
    string=codecs.decode(fname, "hex")  
    new_file_name=(str(string,'utf-8'))

This works on both macos and windows, and serves the purpose of not knowing what you're looking at at first glance.

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