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| -rw-r--r-- | docs/faq.rst | 19 |
1 files changed, 19 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/faq.rst b/docs/faq.rst index 9706faa7..bc6fc255 100644 --- a/docs/faq.rst +++ b/docs/faq.rst @@ -14,6 +14,25 @@ to NaCl. If you prefer NaCl's design, we highly recommend `PyNaCl`_. +Why use ``cryptography``? +------------------------- + +If you've done cryptographic work in Python before you have likely encountered +other libraries in Python such as *M2Crypto*, *PyCrypto*, or *PyOpenSSL*. In +building ``cryptography`` we wanted to address a few issues we observed in the +legacy libraries: + +* Extremely error prone APIs and insecure defaults. +* Use of poor implementations of algorithms (i.e. ones with known side-channel + attacks). +* Lack of maintenance. +* Lack of high level APIs. +* Lack of PyPy and Python 3 support. +* Poor introspectability and thus poor testability. +* Absence of algorithms such as + :class:`AES-GCM <cryptography.hazmat.primitives.ciphers.modes.GCM>` and + :class:`~cryptography.hazmat.primitives.kdf.hkdf.HKDF`. + Compiling ``cryptography`` on macOS produces a ``fatal error: 'openssl/aes.h' file not found`` error ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |