Cryptease: easier encryption

cryptease provides an simple API and command line tool for encrypting and decrypting files and other blobs of data. cryptease is able to encrypt and decrypt content in chunks, which can be useful for encrypting and decrypting extremely large files. It also supports opening encrypted files as a file-like-object for reading decrypted content on the fly.

Table of contents

1. Requirements
2. Installation
3. Basic command line usage
4. Basic API usage
5. Advanced
6. Comments

Requirements

Cryptease works with Python versions 2 and 3.

Installation

The easiest way to install cryptease is with pip

pip install cryptease

Basic command line usage

There is a simple command line utility shipped with this library that can be used to quickly encrypt a file

$ crypt.py --encrypt file.txt --output-file file.enc

and decrypt a file

$ crypt.py --decrypt file.enc --output-file file.dec

Basic API usage

The cryptease library provides an way to build custom software and applications that need to encrypt or decrypt files in one shot or one chunk at a time. Use cryptease.encrypt to encrypt a string in memory using AES-256 encryption

import io
import cryptease as crypt

content = 'Hello, World!'

key = crypt.kdf('password')

ciphertext = b''
for chunk in crypt.encrypt(content, key):
    ciphertext += chunk

for chunk in crypt.decrypt(io.BytesIO(ciphertext), key):
    print chunk,

To serialize the encrpyted data (i.e., cipher text) and some metadata about the key to a flat file, simply pass the filename argument

import io
import cryptease as crypt

content = 'Hello, World!'

key = crypt.kdf('password')
crypt.encrypt(io.BytesIO(content), key, filename='file.enc')

To deserialize the encrypted file to a decrypted file, simply open the file, pass it to cryptease.encrypt, and pass the filename parameter to cryptease.decrypt

import cryptease as crypt

with open('file.enc') as fp:
    key = crypt.key_from_file(fp, 'password')
    crypt.decrypt(fp, key, filename='file.dec')