#24994: Document/check that settings.SECRET_KEY should be a valid unicode string
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Reporter: Baptiste Mispelon | Owner: MaartenPI
Type: | Status: new
Cleanup/optimization |
Component: Core (System | Version: 1.8
checks) |
Severity: Normal | Resolution:
Keywords: | Triage Stage: Accepted
Has patch: 1 | Needs documentation: 0
Needs tests: 0 | Patch needs improvement: 1
Easy pickings: 0 | UI/UX: 0
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Comment (by Andres Mejia):
Cryptographic keys are suppose to be random bytes that don't necessarily
represent a Unicode string. See also the RFC I linked in my comment.
I think it's fair to assume devs using the SECRET_KEY know it must be used
as bytes. Various crypto libraries will refuse to accept them otherwise.
This is true of the hmac, cryptography, and pyOpenSSL libraries.
As for my use case, a common practice is to use an external script or
program to pipe secrets into processes that need them. I use something
like this to not only setup my Django sites but to also rotate the secrets
in them whenever necessary. The output from a subprocess.check_output()
call is in bytes. As of now, since Django accepts the SECRET_KEY as bytes,
I use random bytes for my SECRET_KEY and have it loaded in my Django sites
via an external program.
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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/24994#comment:14>
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