# itsdangerous¶

Sometimes you just want to send some data to untrusted environments. But how to do this safely? The trick involves signing. Given a key only you know, you can cryptographically sign your data and hand it over to someone else. When you get the data back you can easily ensure that nobody tampered with it.

Granted, the receiver can decode the contents and look into the package, but they can not modify the contents unless they also have your secret key. So if you keep the key secret and complex, you will be fine.

Internally itsdangerous uses HMAC and SHA-512 for signing by default. The initial implementation was inspired by Django’s signing module. It also supports JSON Web Signatures (JWS). The library is BSD licensed.

## Installing¶

Install and update using pip:

pip install -U itsdangerous


## Example Use Cases¶

• You can serialize and sign a user ID in a URL and email it to them to unsubscribe from a newsletter. This way you don’t need to generate one-time tokens and store them in the database. Same thing with any kind of activation link for accounts and similar things.
• Signed objects can be stored in cookies or other untrusted sources which means you don’t need to have sessions stored on the server, which reduces the number of necessary database queries.
• Signed information can safely do a roundtrip between server and client in general which makes them useful for passing server-side state to a client and then back.