@OBSCURE
— Mangles a text
string, making it difficult to read.
Syntax:
%@OBSCURE[
text]
text | text to be obfuscated |
The input text should be reasonably short,
preferably not more than a kilobyte or two. The resulting, mangled string will
be longer than the original string, usually by about one-third. The same input
text can return different obfuscated text; you
cannot meaningfully compare the output from two calls to @OBSCURE
.
Do not edit or alter the returned text in any way.
If the input text comes from an environment
variable, it’s probably a good idea to remove or overwrite that variable
as soon as possible after calling @OBSCURE
. One way to do this
would be to simply store the returned string back in the original variable.
set inifile="%userprofile\Passwords.ini"
input /p Enter password: %%password
set password=%@obscure[%password]
set rv=%@iniwrite[%inifile,Personal,Password,%password]
unset inifile password
• Note: This function does not provide
secure cryptography! It was designed for ease of use, not for real
security. Using @OBSCURE
to muddle text will discourage casual
snooping, but a sophisticated user can recover the original data easily by
passing the obscured text to @CLARIFY
.
(A determined attacker could also reverse-engineer the algorithm, although that
would be a pointless waste of time when the plugin itself is readily
available.)
See also: the @CLARIFY
function.