pycrypto is not maintained anymore please use PyCryptodome for existing software that depends on… (2024)

FAQs

Is PyCrypto maintained? ›

It looks like PyCrypto is no longer maintained because it's for Python 2, which reached the end of its life a while back, and that you should try PyCryptodome instead.

pycrypto library is known to have publicly disclosed buffer overflow vulnerability https://github.com/dlitz/pycrypto/issues/176. It is no longer actively maintained and has been deprecated in favor of pyca/cryptography library.

** The developers don't react to issues on the issue tracker anymore. This means PyCrypto is *de facto* dead.

PyCryptodome is a fork of PyCrypto. It brings several enhancements with respect to the last official version of PyCrypto (2.6. 1), for instance: Authenticated encryption modes (GCM, CCM, EAX, SIV, OCB)

PyCrypto is written and tested using Python version 2.1 through 3.3. Python 1.5. 2 is not supported. The modules are packaged using the Distutils, so you can simply run “python setup.py build” to build the package, and “python setup.py install” to install it.

These two packages serve very different goals: crypto is a command line utility, which is intended to encrypt files, while pycrypto is a Python library which can be used from within Python to perform a number of different cryptographic operations (hashing, encryption/decryption, etc).

Cryptographic systems can be vulnerable to outside attacks beyond the well-known brute-force attacks. Cryptographic main weaknesses come in two forms: weaknesses within the algorithm itself and weaknesses with their implementation. To clarify, the latter are called side-channel attacks.

However, cryptography does not clear memory by default, as there is no way to clear immutable structures such as bytes . As a result, cryptography , like almost all software in Python is potentially vulnerable to this attack.

Overall, PyCryptodome is a powerful and easy-to-use library for implementing strong encryption and other cryptographic functions in Python applications. Its wide range of supported algorithms and consistent API make it a popular choice for developers who require secure data storage and communication.

PyCryptodome also supports other encryption modes, such as CBC, CTR, and OFB, as well as other key sizes and padding schemes. Additionally, the library provides functions for generating RSA keys, signing and verifying data with digital signatures, and generating message digests.