When you create a new Django project using startproject, the settings.py file is generated automatically and gets a random SECRET_KEY value. This value is the key to securing signed data-it is vital you keep this secure, or attackers could use it to generate their own signed values.

Django's signing methods live in the django.core.signing module. To sign a value, first instantiate a Signer instance:

>>> from django.core.signing import Signer
>>> signer = Signer()
>>> value = signer.sign('My string')
>>> value
'My string:GdMGD6HNQ_qdgxYP8yBZAdAIV1w'

The signature is appended to the end of the string, following the colon. You can retrieve the original value using the unsign method:

>>> original = signer.unsign(value)
>>> original
'My string'

If the signature or value have been altered in any way, a django.core.signing.BadSignature exception will be raised:

>>> from django.core import signing
>>> value += 'm'
>>> try:
   ... original = signer.unsign(value)
   ... except signing.BadSignature:
   ... print("Tampering detected!")

By default, the Signer class uses the SECRET_KEY setting to generate signatures. You can use a different secret by passing it to the Signer constructor:

>>> signer = Signer('my-other-secret')
>>> value = signer.sign('My string')
>>> value
'My string:EkfQJafvGyiofrdGnuthdxImIJw'

django.core.signing.Signer returns a signer which uses key to generate signatures and sep to separate values. sep cannot be in the URL safe base64 alphabet. This alphabet contains alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores.

If you do not wish for every occurrence of a particular string to have the same signature hash, you can use the optional salt argument to the Signer class. Using a salt will seed the signing hash function with both the salt and your SECRET_KEY:

>>> signer = Signer()
>>> signer.sign('My string')
'My string:GdMGD6HNQ_qdgxYP8yBZAdAIV1w'
>>> signer = Signer(salt='extra')
>>> signer.sign('My string')
'My string:Ee7vGi-ING6n02gkcJ-QLHg6vFw'
>>> signer.unsign('My string:Ee7vGi-ING6n02gkcJ-QLHg6vFw')
'My string'

Using salt in this way puts the different signatures into different namespaces. A signature that comes from one namespace (a particular salt value) cannot be used to validate the same plaintext string in a different namespace that is using a different salt setting. The result is to prevent an attacker from using a signed string generated in one place in the code as input to another piece of code that is generating (and verifying) signatures using a different salt.

Unlike your SECRET_KEY, your salt argument does not need to stay secret.

TimestampSigner is a subclass of Signer that appends a signed timestamp to the value. This allows you to confirm that a signed value was created within a specified period of time:

>>> from datetime import timedelta
>>> from django.core.signing import TimestampSigner
>>> signer = TimestampSigner()
>>> value = signer.sign('hello')
>>> value 'hello:1NMg5H:oPVuCqlJWmChm1rA2lyTUtelC-c'
>>> signer.unsign(value)
'hello'
>>> signer.unsign(value, max_age=10)
...
SignatureExpired: Signature age 15.5289158821 > 10 seconds
>>> signer.unsign(value, max_age=20)
'hello'
>>> signer.unsign(value, max_age=timedelta(seconds=20))
'hello'

sign(value) signs value and appends the current timestamp.

unsign(value, max_age=None) checks if value was signed less than max_age seconds ago, otherwise raises SignatureExpired. The max_age parameter can accept an integer or a datetime.timedelta object.

If you wish to protect a list, tuple or dictionary you can do so using the signing module's dumps and loads functions. These imitate Python's pickle module, but use JSON serialization under the hood. JSON ensures that even if your SECRET_KEY is stolen an attacker will not be able to execute arbitrary commands by exploiting the pickle format:

>>> from django.core import signing
>>> value = signing.dumps({"foo": "bar"})
>>> value 'eyJmb28iOiJiYXIifQ:1NMg1b:zGcDE4-TCkaeGzLeW9UQwZesciI'
>>> signing.loads(value) {'foo': 'bar'}

Because of the nature of JSON (there is no native distinction between lists and tuples) if you pass in a tuple, you will get a list from signing.loads(object):

>>> from django.core import signing
>>> value = signing.dumps(('a','b','c'))
>>> signing.loads(value)
['a', 'b', 'c']

django.core.signing.dumps(obj, key=None, salt='django.core.signing', compress=False)

Returns URL-safe, sha1 signed base64 compressed JSON string. Serialized object is signed using TimestampSigner.

django.core.signing.loads(string, key=None, salt='django.core.signing', max_age=None)

Reverse of dumps(), raises BadSignature if signature fails. Checks max_age (in seconds) if given.

The django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware provides several security enhancements to the request/response cycle. Each one can be independently enabled or disabled with a setting.

For more on security headers and these settings, see Chapter 17, Django Middleware.

In the next chapter, we will expand on the quick install guide from Chapter 1, Introduction to Django and Getting Started and look at some additional installation and configuration options for Django.