Episode
Python Cryptography Breaks Up with OpenSSL with Paul Kehrer and Alex Gaynor
Security Cryptography Whatever · Feb 2, 2026 · 1 h 13 min
The Python cryptography module, pyca/cryptography, has mostly been a sane wrapper around a pile of C, so that users get performant cryptography on the many, many platforms Python targets. Therefore its maintainers, Alex Gaynor and Paul Kehrer, have become intimately familiar with OpenSSL. Recently, they declared that after many years of trying to make it work, they announced pyca/cryptography…