Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Hashing passwords


Avoiding storing passwords in plain text is a known best practice, as software usually only needs to check whether the password provided by the user is correct, and the hash of the password can be stored and compared with the hash of the provided password. If the two hashes match, the passwords are equal; if they don't, the provided password is wrong.

Storing passwords is a pretty standard practice, and usually they are stored as a hash plus some salt. The salt is a randomly generated string that is joined with the password before hashing. Being randomly generated, it ensures that even hashes of equal passwords get different results.

The Python standard library provides a pretty complete set of hashing functions, some of them very well-suited to storing passwords.

How to do it...

Python 3 introduced key derivation functions, which are especially convenient when storing passwords. Both pbkdf2 and scrypt are provided. While scrypt is more robust against attacks as it's both memory...