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From: Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: __init__ is the initialiser
Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 08:44:28 -0500
Organization: IISS Elusive Unicorn
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On Sun, 02 Feb 2014 18:40:59 -0500, Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> declaimed the
following:

>I'm reasonably sure you posted this as humor, but there is some truth in 
>what you said.  In the crypto/security domain, you often want to keep a 
>key or cleartext around only for the time it's needed, and scrub the 
>memory it was occupying as soon as it is no longer in use.
>
>I don't know how you would do that in Python.

	Don't store it as text... Use a numeric array of byte values, which can
then be run through a clearing procedure (overwrite with random values,
overwrite with ones complement of same random values, overwrite with new
random values).

	Python may be caching the individual byte values, but the are unlikely
to be in any sequence indicative of a key.

-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/