{"id":131562,"date":"2023-02-01T13:09:16","date_gmt":"2023-02-01T13:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.finxter.com\/?p=1101975"},"modified":"2023-02-01T13:09:16","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T13:09:16","slug":"two-easy-ways-to-encrypt-and-decrypt-python-strings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2023\/02\/01\/two-easy-ways-to-encrypt-and-decrypt-python-strings\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Easy Ways to Encrypt and Decrypt Python Strings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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5\/5 – (1 vote) <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Today I gave a service consultant access to one of my AWS servers. I have a few files on the server that I was reluctant to share with the service consultant because these files contain sensitive personal data. Python is my default way to solve these types of problems. Naturally, I wondered how to encrypt this data using Python — and decrypt it again after the consultant is done? In this article, I’ll share my learnings! \"\ud83d\udc47\"<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\ud83d\udd10\" Question<\/strong>: Given a Python string. How to encrypt the Python string using a password or otherwise and decrypt the encrypted phrase to obtain the initial cleartext again?<\/p>\n

There are several ways to encrypt and decrypt Python strings. I decided to share only the top two ways (my personal preference is Method 1<\/strong>):<\/p>\n

Method 1: Cryptography Library Fernet<\/h2>\n
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To encrypt and decrypt a Python string, install and import the cryptography<\/code> library, generate a Fernet key, and create a Fernet<\/code> object with it. You can then encrypt the string using the Fernet.encrypt()<\/code> method and decrypt the encrypted string using the Fernet.decrypt()<\/code> method.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t already, you must first install the cryptography<\/code> library using the pip install cryptography<\/code> shell command or variants thereof. \"\ud83d\udc49\" See more here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s a minimal example where I’ve highlighted the encryption and decryption calls:<\/p>\n

# Import the cryptography library\nfrom cryptography.fernet import Fernet # Generate a Fernet key\nkey = Fernet.generate_key() # Create a Fernet object with that key\nf = Fernet(key) # Input string to be encrypted\ninput_string = \"Hello World!\" # Encrypt the string\nencrypted_string = f.encrypt(input_string.encode()) # Decrypt the encrypted string\ndecrypted_string = f.decrypt(encrypted_string) # Print the original and decrypted strings\nprint(\"Original String:\", input_string)\nprint(\"Decrypted String:\", decrypted_string.decode())<\/pre>\n
This small script first imports the Fernet<\/code> class from the cryptography<\/code> library that provides high-level cryptographic primitives and algorithms such as <\/p>\n