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Author here. Thanks for pointing out the security issue! I'm a novice in cryptography, and the encryption used in this program was just an idea I came up with. I'm going to learn a bit more, but if you have any good ideas for improvements, could you let me know?

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Cryptography is tricky to get right. There are a ton of subtle ways things can go wrong! I think the first thing to realize is your problem has probably been solved by someone else, so you can use off-the-shelf solutions. TLS has a pre-shared symmetric key option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLS-PSK for example.

Second, I think it's important to know how crypto fails in order to use it properly. https://www.cryptopals.com has a bunch of challenges that walk you through breaking a crypto implementation.

I can fully recommend this book by one of the TLS 1.3 contributors; it doesn't require a cryptographer background and serves as an extremely good starting point: https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=...

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