It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module

Re:It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module by Luit on Sunday June 10, 2012 @07:26AM (#4090782)

Well then fork it and make it use HMAC with SHA256/512... Additionally, "Do not use this module" is bad advice if it leads to someone making their own MAC implementation, because that's almost always a bad idea. HMAC-SHA1 still is good security for this purpose.

I bet that as soon as standards bodies (like NIST) actively encourage you to use better hash functions (which they will probably do soon) the developer of this module will decide on what is safe enough for this purpose.

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Re:It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module by gambler on Sunday June 10, 2012 @08:20AM (#4090853)

You advise to "fork it", but immediately after that you add the notorious "do not write your own" meme. Can you see the inconsistency of the messages?

Part of security is being up-to-date in regards to things like hashes. If authors don't update their own libraries and you need to tweak them manually, how is it different from "writing your own"?

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Re:It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module by Luit on Sunday June 10, 2012 @11:31AM (#4091305)

I agree I'm a bit inconsistent, but the library is well written, and exchanging the hashing function is a trivial task. That's not really quite "writing your own". I just mean to discourage people who aren't 100% sure they know what they're doing.

I strongly agree with Armin: HMAC-SHA1 (note, the combo, it's not just the latter) is still good security for most applications you'd consider this library for.

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Re:It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module by ebiester on Sunday June 10, 2012 @09:13AM (#4090956)

I always thought the advice against "writing your own" spoke of the algorithm itself, not a library around the algorithm.

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Re:It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module by Locke1689 on Sunday June 10, 2012 @11:27AM (#4091293)

Nope. Google Keyczar: standard algorithms; still screwed up. You should always use the highest level interface available.

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Re:It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module by ch0wn on Sunday June 10, 2012 @08:03AM (#4090826)

It shouldn't be more than changing those two lines:

https://github.com/mitsuhiko/itsdangerous/blob/59f3bf7877e21...

And the tests, of course.

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Re:It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module by Luit on Sunday June 10, 2012 @08:14AM (#4090842)

My point exactly! Armin (the maker/maintainer of the module) will probably consider doing this somewhere in the future.

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Re:It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module by the_mitsuhiko on Sunday June 10, 2012 @10:53AM (#4091189)

I just pushed out a release that makes it possible to override the digest in a subclass easier.

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Re:It's Dangerous, a Python cryptographic signing module by zokier on Sunday June 10, 2012 @01:06PM (#4091551)

While overrideability is good, wouldn't it be better to also be 'secure by default'? I'd imagine that SHA-2 would be more sensible default for most users.

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