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

Verifying a message's integrity


When sending messages through a public network or storages accessible to other users and systems, we need to know whether the message contains the original content or whether it was intercepted and modified by anyone.

That's a typical form of a man-in-the-middle attack and it's something that can modify anything in our content, which is stored in a place that other people can read too, such as an unencrypted network or a disk on a shared system.

The HMAC algorithm can be used to guarantee that a message wasn't altered from its original state and it's frequently used to sign digital documents to ensure their integrity.

A good scenario for HMAC might be a password-reset link; those links usually include a parameter about the user for whom the password should be reset:http://myapp.com/[email protected].

But anyone might replace the user argument and reset other people's passwords. So, we want to ensure that the link we provide wasn't actually modified...