We're chuffed to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidates for Python 2.6.8, 2.7.3, 3.1.5, and 3.2.3. The only change from the first release candidates is the patching of an additional security hole. The security issue fixed in the second release candidates is in the expat XML parsing library. expat had the same hash security issue detailed below as Python's core types. The hashing algorithm used in the expat library is now randomized. A more thorough explanation of the "hash attack" security hole follows. The main impetus for these releases is fixing a security issue in Python's hash based types, dict and set, as described below. Python 2.7.3 and 3.2.3 include the security patch and the normal set of bug fixes. Since Python 2.6 and 3.1 are maintained only for security issues, 2.6.8 and 3.1.5 contain only various security patches. The security issue exploits Python's dict and set implementations. Carefully crafted input can lead to extremely long computation times and denials of service. [1] Python dict and set types use hash tables to provide amortized constant time operations. Hash tables require a well-distributed hash function to spread data evenly across the hash table. The security issue is that an attacker could compute thousands of keys with colliding hashes; this causes quadratic algorithmic complexity when the hash table is constructed. To alleviate the problem, the new releases add randomization to the hashing of Python's string types (bytes/str in Python 3 and str/unicode in Python 2), datetime.date, and datetime.datetime. This prevents an attacker from computing colliding keys of these types without access to the Python process. Hash randomization causes the iteration order of dicts and sets to be unpredictable and differ across Python runs. Python has never guaranteed iteration order of keys in a dict or set, and applications are advised to never rely on it. Historically, dict iteration order has not changed very often across releases and has always remained consistent between successive executions of Python. Thus, some existing applications may be relying on dict or set ordering. Because of this and the fact that many Python applications which don't accept untrusted input are not vulnerable to this attack, in all stable Python releases mentioned here, HASH RANDOMIZATION IS DISABLED BY DEFAULT. There are two ways to enable it. The -R commandline option can be passed to the python executable. It can also be enabled by setting an environmental variable PYTHONHASHSEED to "random". (Other values are accepted, too; pass -h to python for complete description.) More details about the issue and the patch can be found in the oCERT advisory [1] and the Python bug tracker [2]. These releases are releases candidates and thus not recommended for production use. Please test your applications and libraries with them, and report any bugs you encounter. We are especially interested in any buggy behavior observed using hash randomization. Excepting major calamity, final versions should appear after several weeks. Downloads are at http://python.org/download/releases/2.6.8/ http://python.org/download/releases/2.7.3/ http://python.org/download/releases/3.1.5/ http://python.org/download/releases/3.2.3/ Please test these candidates and report bugs to http://bugs.python.org/ With regards, The Python release team Barry Warsaw (2.6), Georg Brandl (3.2), Benjamin Peterson (2.7 and 3.1) [1] http://www.ocert.org/advisories/ocert-2011-003.html [2] http://bugs.python.org/issue13703