Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. It can be used for simple scripting or sophisticated web applications. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, this book gives you insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or a given standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with 133 recipes on the latest version of Python 3.8. The recipes will benefit everyone, from beginners just starting out with Python to experts. You'll not only learn Python programming concepts but also how to build complex applications. The recipes will touch upon all necessary Python concepts related to data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, and statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively take advantage of it. By the end of this Python book, you will be equipped with knowledge of testing, web services, configuration, and application integration tips and tricks. You will be armed with the knowledge of how to create applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Implementing authentication for web services

Security is a pervasive issue throughout application design, implementation, and ongoing operational support. Every part of an application will have security considerations. Parts of the implementation of security will involve two closely related issues:

  • Authentication: A client must provide some evidence of who they are. This might involve signed certificates or it might involve credentials like a username and password. It might involve multiple factors, such as an SMS message to a phone that the user should have access to. The web server must validate this authentication.
  • Authorization: A server must define areas of authority and allocate these to groups of users. Furthermore, individual users must be defined as members of the authorization groups.

Application software must implement authorization decisions. For Flask, the authorization can be part of each view function. The connection of individual to group...