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(binasc         


        

Answer 1

It looks like what you need to do is XOR each of the characters in the message with the corresponding character in the key. However, to do that you need a bit of interconversion using ord and chr, because you can only 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'

Note that binascii.a2b_qp("hello") just converts a string to another string (though possibly with different encoding).

Your approach, and my code above, will only work if the key is at least as long as the message. However, you can easily repeat the key if required using 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'

To address the issue of unicode/multi-byte characters (raised in the comments below), one can convert the string (and key) to bytes, zip these together, then perform the XOR, something like:

>>> 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❤'