pyca/cryptography

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

7725 stars · 1812 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

pyca/cryptography is a Python package providing cryptographic recipes and primitives, aiming to be Python's 'cryptographic standard library'. It offers both high-level recipes (like Fernet symmetric encryption) and low-level interfaces to algorithms such as symmetric ciphers, message digests, and key derivation functions.

Use cases

• encrypt and decrypt data in python
• generate and verify digital signatures
• hash passwords and derive keys
• work with x509 certificates
• implement tls or ssh protocol primitives
• generate secure random keys and tokens

When to choose

• you need well-audited, maintained cryptographic primitives in Python
• you want both high-level recipes and low-level algorithm access
• you need support for Python 3.9+ and PyPy

When to avoid

• you need a pure-Python implementation without native dependencies
• you want a higher-level API hiding all cryptographic details
• you are doing post-quantum or highly specialized cryptography outside its scope

Facets

library · maturity stable

cryptography security serialization security developer-tools python cross-platform encryption fernet x509 tls hashing key-derivation pypi

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="pyca/cryptography")