Overview

The motivation for developing pyFileSec is to better secure research data obtained from human subjects, e.g., in combination with PsychoPy (http://www.psychopy.org) or the Open Science Framework (http://www.openscienceframework.org). The hope is that pyFileSec will be more widely useful. For example, command-line options make it accessible from non-python or non-open-source programs.

Several truly excellent Python packages are available for encryption. However, file security requires more than just good encryption. The main and potentially unique contribution of pyFileSec is that it aspires to provide cross-platform, secure file-management with a low barrier to entry and a stable API going forward. These considerations motivate many of the design choices.

The main functions provided include encryption (encrypt, decrypt, rotate) and verification (sign, verify). It is also easy to obscure file length (pad, unpad), securely remove files from disk (destroy) and inspect meta-data. Large files (tested up to 8G) and command-line usage are also supported.

By default, file permissions are set to conservative values (only Mac & linux at this point). Unencrypted files are deleted securely after a successful encryption. Multiple hardlinks, version control, and Dropbox folders are detected and reported.

Public-key (asymmetric) encryption is used for security and flexibility, currently relying on calls to OpenSSL for all cryptography. The aim is to provide a robust and easily extensible framework for adding other encryption backends, without requiring changes to the API.

Bug reports and code contributions are welcome; the project is on github and you can contact me there (https://github.com/jeremygray/pyFileSec). For contacting me privately, e.g., about security issues, please look for my gmail address at the top of the main code. Help with Windows would be particularly welcome (see the issues list).

Contributors

Jeremy R. Gray - package author (GPG key D934B0D7)

Thanks to

Michael Stone - awesome code review

Sol Simpson - Windows compatibility

Milestones

• 0.3 class SecFile; Python 3 (2to3 mostly passes now)

• 0.4 An alternative encryption backend (possibly pycrypto and gpg support)

• 0.5 Windows file-permissions

See also

• pyCrypto, M2Crypto, pyOpenSSL - excellent crypto packages, no or few sys-admin features

• pycogworks.crypto - similar audience as pyfilesec, no file encyrption

• Ephemeral - provides encrypted temporary files