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pyca
cryptography
Python2014–2025
pyca / cryptography

cryptography

cryptography is a package designed to expose cryptographic primitives and recipes to Python developers.

29Distinct people
35Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

cryptography is a package designed to expose cryptographic primitives and recipes to Python developers.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 7:56:55 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year35 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-04-09 22:06:12 UTC to 2025-04-19 02:11:56 UTC.

051015202014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 19 mentions; 6 submissions, 13 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC19613
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
pyca/cryptography cryptography is a package which provides cryptographic recipes and primitives to Python developers. Our goal is for it to be your "cryptographic standard library". It supports Python 3.9+ and PyPy3 7.3.11+. cryptography includes both high level recipes and low level interfaces to common cryptographic algorithms such as symmetric ciphers, message digests, and key derivation functions. For example, to encrypt something with cryptography's high level symmetric encryption recipe: >>> from cryptography.fernet import Fernet >>> # Put this somewhere safe! >>> key = Fernet.generate_key() >>> f = Fernet(key) >>> token = f.encrypt(b"A really secret message. Not for prying eyes.") >>> token b'...' >>> f.decrypt(token) b'A really secret message. Not for prying eyes.' You can find more information in the documentation. You can install cryptography with: $ pip install cryptography For full details see the installation documentation. Discussion If you run into bugs, you can file them in our issue tracker. We maintain a cryptography-dev mailing list for development discussion. You can also join #pyca on irc.libera.chat to ask questions or get involved. Security Need to report a security issue? Please consult our security reporting documentation.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

1 sources
I found the issue to be more insidious. Don’t roll your own crypto. Ok, that makes sense. Don’t implement existing crypto algorithms. Ok, arguments sound good. This leaves the options of using existing libraries. Cool. So let’s go find an existing library to deal with validating an SSL certificate chain in Python. PyCrypto (https://www.dlitz.net/software/pycrypto/api/current/) - hmm, so basically the OpenSSL API, probably a minefield unless you are really up on crypto. M2Crypto (https://gitlab.com/m2crypto/m2crypto) - umm, so no real docs. The recommendation is to go read a book about network security with OpenSSL. So after reading a network security book, I should be good to wire together some OpenSSL, right? cryptography (https://cryptography.io/en/latest/) - sweet, we have docs! Hmm, so for humans we have Fernet and the ability to look
Read the rest
at X.509 certificates. But nothing about validating. Oh, but there is a stalled PR (https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/pull/2460) from 14 months ago, to verify a certificate signatures. Which then leaves the typical programmer to – hack something together? So it is (practically) 2017, and using one of the most popular programming languages, you can’t verify an SSL certificate in a sane way without becoming journeyman cryptographer. I like crypto, but using cryptography to integrate with existing protocols/standards sucks. Can we really not have an end-user focused implementation of RFC 5280 with a few knobs to turn? Perhaps people would stop "rolling their own" crypto if there were half-decent, maintained, documented solutions out there. Maybe some day!
In Rolling Your Own Crypto

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