Encoding with ROT13

ROT13 encoding is definitely not the most secure method of encoding anything. Typically, ROT13 was used many years ago to hide offensive jokes on forums as a kind of Not Safe For Work (NSFW) tag so people wouldn't instantly see the remark. These days, it's mostly used within Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges, and you'll find out why.

Getting ready

For this script, we will need quite specific modules. We will be needing the maketrans feature, and the lowercase and uppercase features from the string module.

How to do it…

To use the ROT13 encoding method, we need to replicate what the ROT13 cipher actually does. The 13 indicates that each letter will be moved 13 places along the alphabet scale, which makes the encoding very easy to reverse:

from string import maketrans, lowercase, uppercase
def rot13(message):
   lower = maketrans(lowercase, lowercase[13:] + lowercase[:13])
   upper = maketrans(uppercase, uppercase[13:] + uppercase[:13])
   return message.translate(lower).translate...