Python-RSA version 3.0 has been released. A lot of things have been improved:

• Much more secure

• Following industrial standard PKCS#1; this means compatibility with OpenSSL

• Ability to create and verify detached signatures

• More elegant method of encrypting large files

• Ability to save and load keys in PEM and DER format

• Extensive documentation

• More efficient key generation

Check the Python-RSA page for more information!

photo hosted on Flickr

Update: in the mean time 3.0.1 has been released, which removes an import of the "abc" module. This should make the code compatible with Python 2.5 again. All the documentation (including installation instructions) are the same as before.

I'm thrilled to let you know that I've just added encryption and decryption with random padding to my Python RSA module. The code has become much more secure than it was before, and also makes it capable of encrypting and decrypting binary data! This is a big step towards the practicality of the implementation.

I've implemented the padding according to the PKCS#1 standard. The RSA Algorithm page by DI Management explains how to do this very clearly; cudos to them!

Right now these changes are unreleased. I want to add signing and verifying signatures too before I do that. Maybe I'll deprecate the existing functions, as they are much less secure than all the new stuff I'm adding. If you want to try out what I've changed so far, feel free to grab a copy off my Mercurial repository.

photo hosted on Flickr

UPDATE 14:20: I've also implemented PKCS#1 style signatures and signature verification

UPDATE 2011-07-12: the implementation is compatible with OpenSSL, making it very likely compatible with other implementations of PKCS#1 version 1.5!

A guy named Dave sent me an email today, telling me that my RSA implementation was rather insecure due to the use of the "pickle" Python module. Fortunately I had some nice improvements by Barry Mead already in version control, eagerly waiting to be released. Well, Dave gave me a nice insentive to round up Barry's improvements and send version 2.0 into the world.

Please note that it's a backward-incompatible change. The RSA page shows how you can re-encrypt your data to be compatible (and more secure!) again.

A new version of my pure-Python RSA implementation has been released. The one major change is improved compatibility with Windows.

Download EGG files for Python 2.4, Python 2.5 or the source package at the Python Package index.