Applying IEnumerable to chunked IEnumerable in F# -- Cipher Feedback mode

Having developed the supporting infrastructure to pull data from any IEnumerable into a sequence fixed length buckets, we can now apply it to some practical use. One such is to perform encryption of an input byte sequence in a block-cipher feeback (CFB) mode.

CFB mode is so simple, it almost feels like cheating. Given an initialization vector (IV) -- an arbitrary block of bytes -- as the 0-th ciphertext block, the iterative definition is that the n-th ciphertext block is the encrypted value of the n-1-th block XOR'd with the n-th plaintext block; and by the symmetry of XOR, the n-th plaintext block is recovered from the n-th ciphertext block by the same XOR.

So, let's implement it, and do a simple test that we can easily work out the cipherstream for -- and doesn't actually involve real encryption. So let's take 128-bit blocks, all zeros for the IV, and the identity transformation for our "encryption", and have the integers 0 to 41 as input.

The first ciphertext block will be all zeroes (IV encrypted) XOR'd with 0-15, i.e. 0-15. That XORs with 16-31 to give a second block of all 16s; the final block is 32-41 XORd with 16s, i.e. 48-57.

So, armed with expectations we can write the implementation with appropriate self-test code, thus --

where I've renamed the previous private Ratchet class to the public StreamingSequence type -- a more self-explanatory name for possible re-users; and exposed the Dispose method of the constant (reference, mutable internal state) IEnumerator for end-of-enumeration use.

Here, Seq.collect is being used to flatten the sequence after the block-level operation has been done.

CFB mode is so simple that -- having already done the hard work of breaking any sequence into blocks -- the only thing that stopped the test running through first time was forgetting to re-initialize the CFB operation for the decryption pass.

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Actually, the decryption operation shouldn't be working -- but somehow it does, even when I push in random input, and replace the identity encryption operation with a one-way hash! Something weird is going on here.