Razz's Ramblings

I did a little Symmetric Encryption project some days ago which required me to make a class implementing an interface. One of the methods that needed implementing involved encrypting a file and writing it out base64-encoded. In fact, the encoding requirement came later so I had the encryption bit done easily by reading from the input file and writing to the CryptoStream which in turn wrote to the underlying output file stream, and voila! we had our encrypted file.

After the base64-encoding requirement was communicated to me, it had me in a spin. I mean here I had a neat little method reading and writing to streams working seamlessly. Since CryptoStreams cannot be written to and read from at the same time, this meant I had to re-open the file, base64-encode it and then output it again. Terribly inefficient as I'm sure you'll agree.

Then I came across chaining algorithms (specifically cryptostreams), it was just the thing I was looking for. Maybe, I'm still an intermediate when it comes to dot net because I did not know about this earlier. Here's how it works: (Error-checking and input validation removed for readability).

//Our input and output streams
FileStream fsIn = new FileStream(inputFile, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);
FileStream fsOut = new FileStream(outputFile, FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write);

//Create two ICryptoTransforms
ICryptoTransform base64 = new ToBase64Transform();
ICryptoTransform enc = alg.CreateEncryptor(); //where alg is the SymmetricAlgorithm object ofcourse

//Create the crypto streams chained together
CryptoStream tobase64 = new CryptoStream(fsOut, base64, CryptoStreamMode.Write);
CryptoStream cs = new CryptoStream(tobase64, enc, CryptoStreamMode.Write);

//So essentially, 'cs' writes to 'tobase64' and 'tobase64' writes to our output stream

// Now, create a buffer to encrypt input file in chunks rather than in one go
byte[] buffer = new byte[8192];
int bytesRead;

do
{
// read a chunk of data from the input file
bytesRead = fsIn.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);

// The input data is written to the crypto stream
// and automatically base64-encoded and written to
// the output stream
cs.Write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
} while (bytesRead != 0);

cs.Close(); //closes the underlying 'fsOut' and 'tobase64' streams as well
fsIn.Close();

And we're done. Pretty nifty ... eh?

This blog seems to have gone into oblivion recently. Updates have been long overdue and while I have been updating my other blog (Waking Life), I don't know why I never bothered to post here. Anyways, first thing's first.

We finally decided on our final year project (and belive me, it was quite a decision). We chose to go for a Roverbot (a robotic rover vehicle ), much like the Mars Rover except a hell of a lot simpler. The title of the project reads 'Autonomous Roverbot using Scene Analysis'. This means we're going to mount a tiny wireless camera on the roverbot and use it to perform scene analysis. Scene Analysis involves image processing and it could be used to achieve a lot of different objectives like Object Detection, Tracking to name a few.

The idea is to modify a remote-controlled toy car and interface the remote with the computer and develop a software that can communicate with the car using this interface. This is just the communications bit, there will be a separate software module which will process images and issue commands to the vehicle. It's an exciting project indeed and we will be using tools such as Matlab and Intel's OpenCV to get it done. More on it later.