scrypt 0.5.0

Bindings for the scrypt key derivation function library

This is a set of [Python][] bindings for the [scrypt][] key derivation function.

Scrypt is useful when encrypting password as it is possible to specify a minimum amount of time to use when encrypting and decrypting. If, for example, a password takes 0.05 seconds to verify, a user won’t notice the slight delay when signing in, but doing a brute force search of several billion passwords will take a considerable amount of time. This is in contrast to more traditional hash functions such as MD5 or the SHA family which can be implemented extremely fast on cheap hardware.

Installation

$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/mhallin/py-scrypt $ cd py-scrypt $ python setup.py build

Become superuser (or use virtualenv): # python setup.py install

Run tests after install: $ python tests/scrypt-tests.py

If you want py-scrypt for your Python 3 environment, just run the above commands with your Python 3 interpreter. Py-scrypt supports both Python 2 and 3.

Usage

The bindings are very simple – there is an encrypt and a decrypt method on the scrypt module:

>>> import scrypt
>>> data = scrypt.encrypt('a secret message', 'password', maxtime=0.1) # This will take at least 0.1 seconds
>>> data[:20]
'scrypt\x00\r\x00\x00\x00\x08\x00\x00\x00\x01RX9H'
>>> scrypt.decrypt(data, 'password', maxtime=0.1) # This will also take at least 0.1 seconds
'a secret message'
>>> scrypt.decrypt(data, 'password', maxtime=0.05) # scrypt won't be able to decrypt this data fast enough
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
scrypt.error: decrypting file would take too long
>>> scrypt.decrypt(data, 'wrong password', maxtime=0.1) # scrypt will throw an exception if the password is incorrect
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
scrypt.error: password is incorrect

From these, one can make a simple password verifier using the following functions:

def randstr(length):

return ‘’.join(chr(random.randint(0,255)) for i in range(length))

def hash_password(password, maxtime=0.5, datalength=64):

return scrypt.encrypt(randstr(datalength), password, maxtime=maxtime)

def verify_password(hashed_password, guessed_password, maxtime=0.5):

try:

scrypt.decrypt(hashed_password, guessed_password, maxtime) return True

except scrypt.error:

return False

Acknowledgements

[Scrypt][] was created by Colin Percival and is licensed as 2-clause BSD. Since scrypt does not normally build as a shared library, I have included the source for the currently latest version of the library in this repository. When a new version arrives, I will update these sources.

[Burstaholic][] on Bitbucket provided the necessary changes to make the library build on Windows.

License

This library is licensed under the same license as scrypt; 2-clause BSD.

[scrypt]: http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html [Python]: http://python.org