Pycryptopp is a collection of Python interfaces to a few good crypto algorithms. It lives at https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp
RECOMMENDED algorithms:
- AES-CTR ; from the Crypto++ library ; see pycryptopp.cipher.aes
- XSalsa20 ; from the Crypto++ library ; see pycryptopp.cipher.xsalsa20
- Ed25519 ; from the supercop library ; see pycryptopp.publickey.ed25519
DEPRECATED algorithms:
The maintainers of pycryptopp intend to stop supporting these soon. Please migrate away from depending on pycryptopp's implementation of these algorithms, or else write to us and offer some inducement to continue supporting them.
- RSA from the Crypto++ library ; see pycryptopp.publickey.rsa ; deprecated in favor of Ed25519
- Ecdsa from the Crypto++ library ; see pycryptopp.publickey.ecdsa ; deprecated in favor of Ed25519
- SHA-256 from the Crypto++ library ; see pycryptopp.hash.sha256 ; deprecated in favor of the Python Standard Library's hashlib module
You may use this package under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or, at your option, any later version. You may use this package under the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1.0 or, at your option, any later version. (You may choose to use this package under the terms of either licence, at your option.) See the file COPYING.GPL for the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. See the file COPYING.TGPPL.html for the terms of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1.0.
The Ed25519 code comes from the python-ed25519 distribution ¹, for which the basic C code is in the public domain, and the Python bindings are under the MIT license. See COPYING.ed25519 for details.
To build it run "python setup.py build". To test it run "python setup.py test". To install it into your system run "python setup.py install". To create a binary package run "python setup.py bdist_egg".
If "python setup.py test" doesn't print out "PASSED" and exit with exit code 0 then there is something seriously wrong. Do not use this build of pycryptopp. Please report the error to the tahoe-dev mailing list ².
To see some simple benchmarks run "python setup.py bench". If the "pyutil" library is installed then the benchmarks will include mean, best, worst, and quartiles of wall-clock time, else they will just report the mean wall-clock time per operation.
The documentation is in the docstrings. From a command-line, use "pydoc pycryptopp", "pydoc pycryptopp.cipher", and so on. From within a Python interpreter use "help(pycryptopp)", "help(pycryptopp.cipher)", "help(pycryptopp.cipher.aes)" and so on.
The documentation for pycryptopp.publickey.ed25519 is in README.ed25519.rst, adapted from the upstream python-ed25519 library.
Please post to the tahoe-dev mailing list ² with comments about this package.
If you are not already acquainted with how to use modern cryptography, read Ferguson, Schneier, and Kohno “Cryptography Engineering”. It is easy going and will increase your understanding greatly.
Thanks to Wei Dai and the contributors to Crypto++, Andrew M. Kuchling for his "pycrypto" library which inspired this one, Brian Warner for help on Python packaging questions, python-Ed25519, inspiration, and a million other things besides, Greg Hazel and Samuel Neves for Windows porting and fixing bugs, and Daniel J. Bernstein for Ed25519.
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
Boulder, Colorado, USA
2012-03-18