Welcome to ``cryptography``
===========================

``cryptography`` is a Python library which exposes cryptographic recipes and
primitives. We hope it'll be your one-stop-shop for all your cryptographic
needs in Python.

Installing
----------

We don't yet have a release on PyPI, for now you can install ``cryptography``
directly from Github:

.. code-block:: console

    $ pip install git+https://github.com/pyca/cryptography

Why a new crypto library for Python?
------------------------------------

If you've done cryptographic work in Python before, you've probably seen some
other libraries in Python, such as *M2Crypto*, *PyCrypto*, or *PyOpenSSL*. In
building ``cryptography`` we wanted to address a few issues we observed in the
existing libraries:

* Lack of PyPy and Python 3 support.
* Lack of maintenance.
* Use of poor implementations of algorithms (i.e. ones with known side-channel
  attacks).
* Lack of high level, "Cryptography for humans", APIs.
* Absence of algorithms such as AES-GCM.
* Poor introspectability, and thus poor testability.
* Extremely error prone APIs, and bad defaults.


Contents
--------

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 2

    architecture
    exceptions
    glossary
    contributing
    security
    community

Hazardous Materials
-------------------

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 2

    hazmat/primitives/index
    hazmat/backends/index