Simple, reusable and optimized XOR ciphers in Python.

xor-cipher is a fast implementation of the XOR cipher written using Rust. Our tests show that it can be 1000x faster than pure Python implementations. It has been optimized to breeze through datasets of any size.

Python 3.8 or above is required.

Installing the library with pip is quite simple:

$ pip install xor-cipher

Alternatively, the library can be installed from source:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/xor-cipher/xor-cipher.git

Or via cloning the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/xor-cipher/xor-cipher.git
$ cd xor-cipher
$ pip install .

You can add xor-cipher as a dependency with the following command:

$ uv add xor-cipher

Use the xor function to perform the simple XOR cipher:

>>> from xor_cipher import xor
>>> xor(b"Hello, world!", 0x42)
b"\n'..-nb5-0.&c"

Use the cyclic_xor function to perform the cyclic XOR variation:

>>> from xor_cipher import cyclic_xor
>>> cyclic_xor(b"Hello, world!", b"BLOB")
b"\n)#.-`o5->#&c"

There are functions to perform the XOR cipher in-place, on bytearray instances:

>>> from xor_cipher import xor_in_place
>>> data = bytearray(b"Hello, world!")
>>> xor_in_place(data, 0x42)
>>> data
bytearray(b"\n'..-nb5-0.&c")

You can find the documentation here.

If you need support with the library, you can send an email.

You can find the changelog here.

You can find the Security Policy of xor-cipher here.

If you are interested in contributing to xor-cipher, make sure to take a look at the Contributing Guide, as well as the Code of Conduct.

xor-cipher is licensed under the MIT License terms. See License for details.