Storing passwords with python

Question

I have a program I'm writing in python, and I have the need to store some passwords. These passwords will be the passwords to ftp servers, so it's important that they're not just plainly visible to everybody. This also means that I can't store a non-reversible hash of the password like you would on a webserver, because I'm not checking if somebody inputs the right password, I'm just relaying the password to somebody else.
So what's the best way to store passwords? I'm using python, and the program will be linux-only.

Answer 1

You could use the system's key ring, e.g. GNOME key ring or KDE wallet.

There's a Python module called keyring that supports multiple key ring providers. I have only tried it on Windows, where it doesn't yet work correctly. Seems like development isn't very active, but you should give it a try. You can also try the package "python-gnomekeyring" which is specific to GNOME and more low-level.

Answer 2

Depending on the distribution you can probably store it in the keychain if one is available.

Otherwise take a look at some of the encryption algorithms available (PGP/GPG, DES, AES etc) and their Python ports/modules but this is hard stuff which you have to get right.