Is Python secure?

Python is a very readable language with simple syntax, and typically, one clearly stated way to do things. It comes with a set of well-tested and compact standard library modules. All of this seems to indicate that Python should be a very secure language.

But is it so?

Let us look at a few examples in Python, and try to analyze the security aspect of Python and its standard libraries.

For the purposes of usefulness, we will demonstrate the code examples shown in this section using both Python 2.x and Python 3.x versions. This is because a number of security vulnerabilities that are present in Python 2.x versions are fixed in the recent 3.x versions. However, since many Python developers are still using some form or the other of Python 2.x, the code examples would be useful to them, and also illustrate the importance of migrating to Python 3.x.

All examples are executed on a machine running the Linux (Ubuntu 16.0), x86_64 architecture:

Note

NOTE: Python 3.x version used for these...