Comments on: ROT13 is used in Windows? You’re joking!

By: Null1024

Null1024 — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:23:08 +0000

ROT13 was probably used because it’s easy and cheap.

By: Didier Stevens

Didier Stevens — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 06:18:31 +0000

I understand why the keys are encrypted (obfuscation), it’s just surprising it’s ROT13. Because I think that there was no ROT13 encryption/decryption function in the Windows library, so they had to add it for these keys. And why add a new function when you can use existing encryption functions?

By: Dean Harding

Dean Harding — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 06:35:58 +0000

I just found your blog linked from Raymond Chen’s where he’s describing the “Most Frequently Used Programs” list.

Anyway, I thought I would just point out that the usual reason for using something like ROT13 is search. For whatever reason, they didn’t want this registry key to show up when you did a search for “notepad.exe” or “Program Files” in the registry. I can think of a few reasons why they would want to do that, but then again, perhaps some clueless manager simply told the developers “this data must be encrypted for security reasons” and the developers (realising that this would be impossible anyway) just used ROT13…