Securely wiping cryptographic secrets in Python
[email protected] Sun, 3 Feb 2013 08:21:08 -0800
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.python.cryptography |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi, if I have a Python program that uses sensitive cryptographic material, is there a way to securely wipe them from memory after use? In C, this is usually done by (_carefully_) overwriting the array where the secrets are stored. Is this possible to do in Python? I bet that if I try to overwrite a string in Python, there is absolutely no guarantee that the previous value of that string won't be copied somewhere else beforehand. What happens if I use a lower level structure, like a bytearray? Is that property of bytearrays guaranteed somewhere in the Python spec? Thanks!