Huge flaw in Ubuntu Dapper’s Python Crypto Module

Crypto is a special case problem. I have a pretty good level of education (formal and personal) but I would still avoid rolling my own solution for anything non-trivial.

This is not so much because I expect to make a mistake, but more because of the impossibility of getting testing (and therefore maturity) that matches an established open source library.

For Java Script one possibility is http://code.google.com/p/clipperz/wiki/CryptoLibrary (AGPL), I'd be interested to hear of others.

This bug was the last straw for why I stopped using the pycrypto library and wrote my own Python wrappers about Crypto++:

http://allmydata.org/trac/pycryptopp

Bug was found a couple of months ago, a patch is available

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-crypto/+bug...

Incidentally, in python 2.5 and later (probably not available in Dapper's repo), you should use the standard hashlib module for generating hash digests.