Python-RSA version 3.1.1 has been released. A lot of things have been improved, thanks to Yesudeep Mangalapilly.

• Much, much faster

• Compatibility with Python 3.2

• Lot of bug fixes

Check the Python-RSA page for more information!

Observant readers may have noticed that I snuck in a tiny minor release. Version 3.1.1 introduces full Python 3.2 compatibility for the key saving/loading stuff as well, and fixes some doctests for Python 2.7. Nothing in the actual RSA stuff was changed.

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.

Today all of a sudden I couldn't commit to CVS any more. Eclipse refused to accept my SSH key passphrase. When trying to load the file, Eclipse tells me failed to decrypt id_rsa.

I recently re-encrypted my private key using ssh-keygen -p, which used AES for the encryption. It turned out that Eclipse doesn't support that.

The solution is quite simple: use openssl to re-encrypt using DES3:

cd ~/.ssh
openssl rsa -in id_rsa -out id_rsa-eclipse -des3
mv id_rsa-eclipse id_rsa

Please note that you may need to restart Eclipse, as it may cache your old key.

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.