How can I obfuscate/de-obfuscate integer properties? - c++

My users will in some cases be able to view a web version of a database table that stores data they've entered. For various reasons I need to include all the stored data, including a number of integer flags for each record that encapsulate adjacencies and so forth within the data (this is for speed and convenience at runtime). But rather than exposing them one-for-one in the webview, I'd like to have an obfuscated field that's just called "reserved" and contains a single unintelligible string representing those flags that I can easily encode and decode.
How can I do this efficiently in C++/Objective C?
Thanks!

Is it necessary that this field is exposed to the user visually, or just that it’s losslessly captured in the HTML content of the webview? If possible, can you include the flags as a hidden input element with each row, i.e., <input type=“hidden” …?

Why not convert each of the fields to hex, and append them as a string and save that value?
As long as you always append the strings in the same order, breaking them back apart and converting them back to numbers should be trivial.

Use symmetric encryption (example) to encode and decode the values. Of course, only you should know of the key.
Alternatively, Assymetric RSA is more powerfull encryption but is less efficient and is more complex to use.
Note: i am curios about the "various reasons" that require this design...

Multiply your flag integer by 7, add 3, and convert to base-36. To check if the resulting string is modified, convert back to base-2, and check if the result modulo 7 is still 3. If so, divide by 7 to get the flags. note that this is subject to replay attacks - users can copy any valid string in.

Just calculate a CRC-32 (or similar) and append it to your value. That will tell you, with a very high probability, if your value has been corrupted.

Related

Storing values of arbitrary type

I want to store arbitrary key value pairs. For example,
{:foo "bar" ; string
:n 12 ; long
:p 1.2 ; float
}
In datomic, I'd like to store it as something like:
[{:kv/key "foo"
:kv/value "bar"}
{:kv/key "n"
:kv/value 12}
{:kv/key "p"
:kv/value 1.2}]
The problem is :kv/value can only have one type in datomic. A solution is to to split :kv/value into :kv/value-string, :kv/value-long, :kv/value-float, etc. It comes with its own issues like making sure only one value attribute is used at a time. Suggestions?
If you could give more details on your specific use-case it might be easier to figure out the best answer. At this point it is a bit of a mystery why you may want to have an attribute that can sometimes be a string, sometimes an int, etc.
From what you've said so far, your only real answer it to have different attributes like value-string etc. This is like in a SQL DB you have only 1 type per table column and would need different columns to store a string, integer, etc.
As your problem shows, any tool (such as a DB) is designed with certain assumptions. In this case the DB assumes that each "column" (attribute in Datomic) is always of the same type. The DB also assumes that you will (usually) want to have data in all columns/attrs for each record/entity.
In your problem you are contradicting both of these assumptions. While you can still use the DB to store information, you will have to write custom functions to ensure only 1 attribute (value-string, value-int, etc) is in use at one time. You probably want custom insertion functions like "insert-str-val", "insert-int-val", etc, as well as custom read functions "read-str-val" etc al. It might be also a good idea to have a validation function that could accept any record/entity and verify that exactly one-and-only-one "type" was in use at any given time.
You can emulate a key-value store with heterogenous values by making :kv/key a :db.unique/identity attribute, and by making :kv/value either bytes-typed or string-typed and encoding the values in the format you like (e.g fressian / nippy for :db.types/bytes, edn / json for :db.types/string). I advise that you set :db/index to false for :kv/value in this case.
Notes:
you will have limited query power, as the values will not be indexed and will need to be de-serialized for each query.
If you want to run transaction functions which read or write the values (e.g for data migrations), you should make your encoding / decoding library available to the Transactor as well.
If the values are large (say, over 20kb), don't store them in Datomic; use a complementary storage service like AWS S3 and store a URL.

SQLITE CHECK constraint for hex values

I want to store IP Address using c++ in sqlite3 DB in hex format. I am using TEXT as the format for storing hex values. I want to perform a check on the value being inserted in the DB. The value range I want to check for is 0x00000000 - 0xFFFFFFFF. For INTEGER type you can check by - CHECK (num BETWEEN 0 AND 100). Is there any way to add check constraint for Hex Values?
If there is an smarter way to store IP address in SQLITE please share with me.
Thanks
I think you have two main choices: (a) store as hex (i.e. text) and check "hex conformity", or (b) store as integer and print it as hex when reading data.
There may be several reasons for preferring the one over the other, e.g. if the application actually provides and receives integer values. Anyway, some examples for option (a) and option (b).
Option (a) - store as text and check hex conformity
the probably simplest way is to use a check based on GLOB as remarked by CL:
value TEXT CONSTRAINT "valueIsHex" CHECK(value GLOB "0x[a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9]")
If logic goes beyond that supported by GLOB, you could install a user defined function, either a general regexp() function or a custom function for your specific needs. This could be the case, if you want to store a complete IP-address in one field and still want to do a conformity check. For help on general regexp() function, confer this SO answer. For help on user defined functions confer, for example, this StackOverflow answer.
Option (b) - store as int and print as hex
If your application is actually working with integers, then change your db schema to integer and add a check like:
value INTEGER CONSTRAINT "valueIsValid" CHECK(value <= 0xFFFFFFFF)
For convenience, you can still print the value as hex using a query (or defining a corresponding view) like the following:
select printf('%08X', value) from theTable

Index-based access on Matrix-like structure in C++

I have a mapping Nx2 between two set of encodings (not relevant: Unicode and GB18030) under this format:
Warning: huge XML, don't open if having slow connection:
http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/data/trunk/charset/data/xml/gb-18030-2000.xml
Snapshot:
<a u="00B7" b="A1 A4"/>
<a u="00B8" b="81 30 86 30"/>
<a u="00B9" b="81 30 86 31"/>
<a u="00BA" b="81 30 86 32"/>
I would like to save the b-values (right column) in a data structure and to access them directly (no searching) with indexes based on a-values (left column).
Example:
I can store those elements in a data structure like this:
unsigned short *my_page[256] = {my_00,my_01, ....., my_ff}
, where the elements are defined like:
static unsigned short my_00[256] etc.
.
So basically a matrix of matrix => 256x256 = 65536 available elements.
In the case of other encodings with less elements and different values (ex. Chinese Big5, Japanese Shift, Korean KSC etc), I can access the elements using a bijective function like this:
element = my_page[(unicode[i]>>8)&0x00FF][unicode[i]&0x00FF];, where unicode[i] is filled with the a-like elements from the mapping (as mentioned above). How do I generate and fill the my_page structure is analogous. For the working encodings, I have like around 7000 characters to store (and they are stored in a unique place in my_page).
The problem comes with the GB18030 encoding, trying to store 30861 elements in my_page (65536 elements). I am trying to use the same bijective function for filling (and then accessing, analogously) the my_page structure, but it fails since the access mode does not return unique results.
For example: For the unicode values, there are more than 1 element accessed via
my_page[(unicode[i]>>8)&0x00FF][unicode[i]&0x00FF] since the indexes can be the same for i and for i+1 for example. Do you know another way of accessing/filling the elements in the my_page structure based only on pre-computed indexes like I was trying to do?
I assume I have to use something like a pseudo-hash function that returns me a range of values VRange and based on a set of rules I can extract from the range VRange the integer indexes of my_page[256][256].
If you have any advice, please let me know :)
Thank you !
For GB18030, refer to this document: http://icu-project.org/docs/papers/gb18030.html
As explained in this article:
“The number of valid byte sequences -- of Unicode code points covered and of mappings defined between them -- makes it impractical to directly use a normal, purely mapping-table-based codepage converter. With about 1.1 million mappings, a simple mapping table would be several megabytes in size.”
So most probably is not good to implement a conversion based on a pure mapping table.
For large parts, there is a direct mapping between GB18030 and Unicode. Most of the four-bytes characters can be translated algorithmically. The author of the article suggests to handle them such ranges with a special code, and the other ones with a classic mapping table. These characters are the ones given in the XML mapping table: http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/data/trunk/charset/data/xml/gb-18030-2000.xml
Therefore, the index-based access on Matrix-like structure in C++ can be a problem opened for whom wants to research on such bijective functions.

Storing data with leading zeros in an integer column for Django

I need to be able to insert numbers like 098532 into my table. This is the exact same question as this but I actually need to store it with the leading zeros as I will be using the data for 3rd party API calls.
The given answer was to format the output which doesn't really solve my problem.
Is the best solution to change the datatype of the column to a CHAR field?
I think your best bet is to store it as a string in a charfield and then cast it when you need something else.
i.e.
num = "051"
int(num)
if you need it as an int. Could you give a little more information about what the api expects and why you need the leading zeroes?

Making an index-creating class

I'm busy with programming a class that creates an index out of a text-file ASCII/BINARY.
My problem is that I don't really know how to start. I already had some tries but none really worked well for me.
I do NOT need to find the address of the file via the MFT. Just loading the file and finding stuff much faster by searching for the key in the index-file and going in the text-file to the address it shows.
The index-file should be built up as follows:
KEY ADDRESS
1 0xABCDEF
2 0xFEDCBA
. .
. .
We have a text-file with the following example value:
1, 8752 FW,
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++,
******************************************************************************,
------------------------------------------------------------------------------;
I hope that this explains my question a bit better.
Thanks!
It seems to me that all your class needs to do is store an array of pointers or file start offsets to the key locations in the file.
It really depends on what your Key locations represent.
I would suggest that you access the file through your class using some public methods. You can then more easily tie in Key locations with the data written.
For example, your Key locations may be where each new data block written into the file starts from. e.g. first block 1000 bytes, key location 0; second block 2500 bytes, key location 1000; third block 550 bytes; key location 3500; the next block will be 4050 all assuming that 0 is the first byte.
Store the Key values in a variable length array and then you can easily retrieve the starting point for a data block.
If your Key point is signified by some key character then you can use the same class, but with a slight change to store where the Key value is stored. The simplest way is to step through the data until the key character is located, counting the number of characters checked as you go. The count is then used to produce your key location.
Your code snippet isn't so much of an idea as it is the functionality you wish to have in the end.
Recognize that "indexing" merely means "remembering" where things are located. You can accomplish this using any data structure you wish... B-Tree, Red/Black tree, BST, or more advanced structures like suffix trees/suffix arrays.
I recommend you look into such data structures.
edit:
with the new information, I would suggest making your own key/value lookup. Build an array of keys, and associate their values somehow. this may mean building a class or struct that contains both the key and the value, or instead contains the key and a pointer to a struct or class with a value, etc.
Once you have done this, sort the key array. Now, you have the ability to do a binary search on the keys to find the appropriate value for a given key.
You could build a hash table in a similar manner. you could build a BST or similar structure like i mentioned earlier.
I still don't really understand the question (work on your question asking skillz), but as far as I can tell the algorithm will be:
scan the file linearly, the first value up to the first comma (',') is a key, probably. All other keys occur wherever a ';' occurs, up to the next ',' (you might need to skip linebreaks here). If it's a homework assignment, just use scanf() or something to read the key.
print out the key and byte position you found it at to your index file
AFAIUI that's the algorithm, I don't really see the problem here?