2018-02-16T22:25:45Z

Nov 14, 2019  10 Ways to Generate a Random Password from the Linux Command Line Lowell Heddings @lowellheddings Updated November 14, 2019, 2:44pm EDT One of the great things about Linux is that you can do the same thing hundreds of different ways—even something as simple as generating a random password can be accomplished with dozens of different commands. About Django Secret Key Generator. The Django Secret Key Generator is used to generate a new SECRETKEY that you can put in your settings.py module. May 11, 2018  I would need to add the app.secretkey = 'SECRET KEY' line to my production app, but I'm not sure where should I place it since my PA Flask app doesn't use the if name 'main': condition. Is it ok if I just add it to the end of my app.py file? Or is there any other recommended solution? This code is needed to setup the Flask-Session sessions. Django SECRETKEY security, how are methods more secure. Ask Question. Finally, would it be a bad practice to randomly generate the secret key each time the webserver process is restarted? This could be completely random, or it could prompt for user input for the key. Protect session data and create random session keys to avoid tampering.

May 10, 2018 I would need to add the app.secretkey = 'SECRET KEY' line to my production app, but I'm not sure where should I place it since my PA Flask app doesn't use the if name 'main': condition. Is it ok if I just add it to the end of my app.py file? Or is there any other recommended solution? This code is needed to setup the Flask-Session. May 25, 2010  Documentation should contain some infos about how to generate secret keys. Documentation should contain some infos about how to generate secret keys. Sponsor pallets/flask Watch 2.3k Star 49k Fork 13.3k Code. Pull requests 4. Document how to generate Secret Keys #47. Closed mitsuhiko opened this issue May 25, 2010 1 comment. CSRF protection requires a secret key to securely sign the token. By default this will use the Flask app's SECRETKEY.If you'd like to use a separate token you can set WTFCSRFSECRETKEY.

Posted by Miguel Grinberg under Security, Programming, Python.

When working with web applications, it is often necessary to generate passwords, tokens or API keys, to be assigned to clients to use as authentication. While there are many sophisticated ways to generate these, in many cases it is perfectly adequate to use sufficiently long and random sequences of characters. The problem is that if you are doing this in Python, there is more than one way to generate random strings, and it isn't always clear which way is the best and most secure.

You would think that adding yet one more method to generate random strings would confuse things even more, but unlike all the other options, the new secrets module introduced in Python 3.6 is actually designed for this specific use case, so from my part it is a welcome addition to the Python standard library. In this short article I'm going to give you an overview of this new module.

Generating Tokens

The secrets module is part of the Python standard library in Python 3.6 and newer. You can import this module into your application or into a Python shell as follows:

At the core of this module there are three functions that generate random tokens using the best random number generator provided by your system. The first function generates binary sequences of random bytes:

Invoking the token_bytes() function without any arguments returns a token with a default length that is determined to be sufficiently safe and secure. You can also pass the desired length as an argument, as you can see in the second example above.

The token_hex() function works in a similar way, but returns a string with the bytes rendered in hexadecimal notation instead of a raw binary string:

Mixvibes cross dj le 2.0 download. With this function, each byte in the sequence is rendered as two hexadecimal digits, so in the second example above, where I request a token with 20 characters, the resulting string is going to be 40 characters long.

The third function in this group is token_urlsafe(), which returns the random string encoded in base64 format:

The base64 encoding is more efficient than hexadecimal. In the example above you can see that when I requested a token of 20 characters, the resulting base64 encoded string is 27 characters long.

Random

How to know when to use each of these functions? For most cases, the token_urlsafe() function is probably the best option, so start from that one. If you prefer random strings encoded in hexadecimal notation (which will give you only characters in the 0-9 and a-f ranges) then use token_hex(). Finally, if you prefer a raw binary string, without any encodings, then use token_bytes().

There are many use cases that benefit from have a simple and secure way to generate tokens. Here are a few examples:

  • API keys that are given to clients after they authenticate with username and password
  • Password reset tokens to be sent to the user by email
  • Initial passwords for new accounts (you will likely want users to change their password after the first login)
  • IDs for background tasks or other asynchronous operations
  • Passwords to assign to other services such as databases, message queues, etc.
  • Dynamically created unique URLs

Generating Random Numbers

While the token generation functions I described in the previous section are the most useful, the secrets module also provides a few functions that deal with random numbers.

The choice() function returns a randomly selected item from the list provided as an argument:

This function can be combined with a list comprehension to generate random strings that only use a specific set of characters. For example, if you want to generate a random string of 20 characters that only uses the letters abcd you can do so as follows:

The randbelow() function generates a random integer number between 0 and the number given as an argument (not including this number):

Finally, the randbits() function returns an random integer number that has the specified number of bits: Tc helicon voicelive play auto tune pedal.

Flask Session Secret Key

Conclusion

I hope you found this little article useful. I find the token generation functions, and in particular token_urlsafe(), very convenient and keep discovering new uses for it. Are you using these functions for an original purpose I have not described in this article? Let me know below in the comments!

Hello, and thank you for visiting my blog! If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting my work on this blog on Patreon!

7 comments

  • #1Eddy van den Aker said 2018-04-20T10:12:29Z

  • #2Miguel Grinberg said 2018-04-22T06:49:12Z

  • #3Chinmay Prabhudesai said 2019-01-08T00:06:52Z

  • #4Miguel Grinberg said 2019-01-08T10:32:19Z

  • #5Abhi said 2019-02-12T18:29:07Z

  • #6Fergus said 2020-04-12T10:21:43Z

  • #7Miguel Grinberg said 2020-04-12T10:27:49Z

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    Comments

    commented May 25, 2010

    Documentation should contain some infos about how to generate secret keys.

    Flask Generate Random Secret Key Location

    commented May 26, 2010

    Document ways to generate secret keys. This closed by 1264c45.

    pushed a commit that referenced this issue Apr 17, 2011
    This issue was closed.

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